Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials.  While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it’s not a matter where government should intervene.

Says Suderman,

It’s easy enough to turn your TV off (or even live without one, as Szoka does). And if that’s too arduous, there are various technological solutions from companies like Dolby and SRS that help keep TV volumes on a more even keel.

[...]

But the larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government’s job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That’s bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It’s also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And  in the end, I think that’s far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Szoka notes that proposed legislation is technically unsound and subject to selective enforcement.  And there’s the issue of freedom:

[T]he bill does embody a recurrent presumption that it’s ok to regulate advertising in ways we wouldn’t accept for the “show” itself (i.e., non-advertising content). Of course, the show could be “commercial” (which, in First Amendment terms, means it would generally get only “intermediate” scrutiny) while the advertisement could be “non-commercial”—such as a political ad. But even if most ads are commercial, so what? If the government is going to protect us from “noisy or strident” commercials, why not all “noisy or strident” programming? Even the most annoying TV ad is probably less annoying than, say, the James Carvilles of the world debating the Glenn Becks of the world. (Of course, users really bothered by noise, but unwilling to give up TV, would probably much rather have a dynamic market for TVs with volume moderating features than rules that dull the din of commercials alone.)

Kevin Drum doesn’t care. He just wants the noise to stop.

[B]laring TV commercials have been an obvious and fixable problem for several decades and no “basic harmony of interests” has yet manifested itself.¹ This suggests to me that it never will unless the industry is pressured into doing it.

[...]

¹A shortcoming, by the way, that’s made worse by the artistic decisions of certain shows.  The worst for me is 24, which I have to crank up in order to hear the hoarse stage whisper that Kiefer Sutherland affects in his Jack Bauer role.  The ads are loud even at the best of times, but they’re really loud when you’ve already turned up the volume just to hear the show itself.

²This is an issue, like the Do Not Call registry, that transcends politics.  I don’t really care whether volume regulations are liberal or conservative or trample the Bill of Rights or whatever.  I just want the noise to stop.  If it takes jackboots to stop it, then so be it.

While I’m naturally in the Suderman-Szoka camp on the issue of Nanny Statism, Drum has persuaded me on this one with the strength of his footnotes.

The fact of the matter is that the federal government has regulated the manner in which television has been broadcast since before we were broadcasting television. (The Radio Commission, the forebear of the FCC, predates television.)  They regulate the spectrum on which broadcasters operate, require a certain amount of “public interest” programming as a condition of licensing, require a certain amount of “truth in advertising,” restrict the use of coarse language and images in over-the-air broadcasts, and otherwise oversee many aspects of what’s shown on television.   Why shouldn’t they set parameters on something that genuinely annoys most of us?

This isn’t a free speech issue. It doesn’t impinge on speech in any way. It merely requires that broadcasters refrain from blaring the ads.

Government already regulates the content of commercial speech, which has long been less protected than political speech.  Indeed, those of us over a certain age can recall the days when those advertising ladies’ undergarments had to use mannequins to demonstrate their wares.  Or that it took the AIDS epidemic to get the FCC to allow advertising for condoms — or, hell, the use of the word “condom.”

Yes, I suppose consumers could invest in sophisticated technology to solve this annoyance.  But why should we have to do that?

Ezra Klein enjoys cooking and endorses “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver’s notion that we’d be a healthier society if we cooked our meals at home rather than eating so much high calorie fare at chain restaurants.  Still, he notes,

The problem is that the evidence suggests meals aren’t driving the rise in obesity — snacks are. A 2003 paper by economists David Cutler, Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro looked at an array of different ways to measure caloric intake, and found that most meals aren’t getting much bigger. Dinner, in fact, might be getting a bit smaller. The big increase in caloric intake actually came between meals. In 1977, Americans reported eating about 186 calories outside of mealtimes. By 1994, that had rocketed to 346 calories. It’s likely even higher now. That difference alone is enough to explain the changes in our national waistline. And it won’t go away if we begin cooking dinners but still are purchasing 20-ounce bottles of Coke at the office.

Matt Yglesias agrees and argues that we should be “cultivating cultural taboos against prepared food,” by which he means prepackaged items ranging from sodas to chips to candy bars to microwave burritos.  But, since we all know that these things are “bad” for us if consumed more than occasionally, that’s going to be hard.  We eat this junk because it’s convenient, tasty, and cheap — not because we think it’s nutritious.

Evidence indicates that you could modestly improve public health and raise a nice chunk of change with a soda tax. Presumably something similar would apply to taxing chips and candy and so forth. You could fund a grapes-promotion program with the money. Or, you know, a robust national network of free clinics at which people could receive basic health care treatment and nutritional advice.

Who is it that isn’t aware that grapes are better for you than Snickers bars and Doritos?  We don’t need a grape-promotion program, we need grapes to be instantly and cheaply available in the same way that chips and candy bars are.   That’s pretty hard to do, given the relative perishability of said items.   And, frankly, people are still likely to prefer a Snickers to a bunch of grapes in between meetings.

Taxes on sodas and snack foods might indeed promote healthier eating.  But only by artificially raising prices and making it harder for poor people to eat what they want.  And it’s not as if they’re going to instead decide to have a boneless chicken breast wrap and some Evian; they’ll just be a little hungrier and less happy. (Snickers, I’m reliably informed, really satisfies.)  The net result will be more misery for the least well off.  And, of course, less freedom.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler)

The work of anthropologists and archaeologists, especially Robert and Linda Braidwood, has increasingly demonstrated that our species has preferentially sought out the food source with the highest level of fat in our environment for, essentially, as long as we’ve been a species. Policies based on changing that in the near term whether through advertising, social pressure, or taxation are doomed to failure. We’re just not built that way.

Update (Steve Verdon):

The thing about this issue that interests me is its connection to the health care debate. I’ve discussed before how using life expectancy as a measure of the efficacy of a countries health care system is a dubious measure. This highlights why. Is obesity bad for health outcomes? Yes. But is it something the medical industry can do much about? No. This is a behavioral issue that impacts things like health outcomes and life expectancy.

As part of their ongoing effort to cement George Orwell’s reputation by making him the most accurate prophet in history, the British Home Office is now investigating the possiblity of forcing every Pub in Britain to replace pint glasses with plastic pint cups:

The BBC reported recently that the British Home Office is seeking a new design for pint glasses that it hopes may reduce the number of incidents in which people attack each other with pint glasses. According to official statistics, 5,500 people are attacked with glasses and bottles every year in England and Wales. (Probably lots more in Scotland, though maybe they just use swords.) This public safety emergency has spurred the government into action, seeking a design that cannot be used as a weapon.

Designers say they are considering two basic approaches: (1) plastic, or (2) something else. First, glasses could be made from plastic, or could be coated with it so that the glass would not shatter into sharp pieces if broken. Second, “[w]e could do something more radical,” said one designer, “by looking at the whole shape and substance of the pint – we could come up with something that is completely different [from] glass.” Seems a lot like the first approach, and it wasn’t clear what he had in mind. But he continued: “Remember that years ago people used to drink out of pewter tankards. It could be quite a significant paradigm shift.” That’s a great idea – I’d much rather be clubbed to death with a pewter tankard.

As Cory Doctorow notes, this is an essential piece of legislation

Because, you know, most bar-brawlers are fundamentally upset at the pint, not the people around them, and if they can’t smash a pint sleeve, they will contain their anger and not use a chair, bottle, or imposing scarred forehead.

Indeed.

In answer to James’ query below about when a state or county have forced unmarried people not to live together, meet Olivia Shelltrack, Fondray Loving and their three children.

Welcome to Wednesday afternoon at 12475 Parkwood Lane in Black Jack, Mo.: In his room on the second floor, 8-year-old Cortez Loving wages an intergalactic battle with dozens of action figures; next door, sister Katarina, 10, practices her electronic keyboard; and down the hall, 15-year-old Alexia watches TV.

It might seem like a typical family scene—except that in this particular town in the St. Louis suburbs, the three children and their parents, Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, don’t meet the local definition of “family.” Last month the engaged couple, who have lived together for 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit for their home because they are in violation of a 1998 ordinance that allows no more than three “unrelated” individuals to share a single residence. On March 21 the city council will decide whether to allow the five to stay in Black Jack—or force them to move out.

The Nanny State, its for your own good. Sorry James.

I tell you these Nanny State types really are grating. Now it isn’t just second hand smoke, but third hand smoke. What is third hand smoke? That smell from people that have just had a cigerette. That is apparently a super duper deadly toxic brew of chemicals that can KILL!!! Run!!!!

Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, he said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he said. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’”

This reminds me of the scene in The Ice Storm where Elijah Wood is talking about molecules and how when you smell the odor of fecal matter in a bathroom you are really breathing in feces molecules.

Because of molecules we are connected to the outside world from our bodies. Like when you smell things, because when you smell a smell it’s not really a smell, it’s a part of the object that has come off of it, molecules. So when you smell something bad, it’s like in a way you’re eating it. This is why you should not really smell things, in the same way that you don’t eat everything in the world around you because as a smell, it gets inside of you. So the next time you go into the bathroom after someone else has been there, remember what kinds of molecules you are in fact eating.–Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood)

Anyways, back to the article,

Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.

I love this. Cyanide is used in chemcial weapons! OMGWTF?!?!?! What you might also find interesting is that cyanide compounds are given off by a plethora of household items when burned. For example, all that tupper ware you have sitting in your kitchen? Basically a pile of chemical weapons. The foam in various furniture cushions? Chemical weapons. Even wool and silk when burned….chemical weapons. And sodium nitroprusside, a cyanide compound that is used in hospitals to reduce the blood pressure of people in hypertensive emergency….chemical weapon. I know, calling plastic food storage containers, foam cushions, a wool sweater, and a drug used in hospital emergencies a chemical weapon is ridiculous. But so is implying the minute amounts of cyanide given off by a person who just had a butt a chemical weapon ridiculous. Also several of these chemicals are found in household products.

Granted, the notion of smoking near an infant or while in the car with your infant–even with the window cracked–is probably not a good idea. The idea behind the danger of toxic substances is that the does makes the poison. A minute dose (i.e. a smoker passing you in the hallway at work) of something like cyanide is very unlikely to have an impact. However, infants are more susceptible to toxins than older children and especially adults. If you are a smoker and you plan on having kids, you should quit. At the very least it will be good for you, and you’ll likely be around longer to enjoy your kids. But if you decide not too, this idea that the smell that lingers on your clothes is a danger? Probably not the case. If you went to your pediatrician after passing a guy who was working with paints and paint thinners most of the day worried and frantic, he’d probably be a bit upset with you.

And one last thing, the article doesn’t correctly describe the study. The study isn’t about determining the dangers of third hand smoke, but about people’s attitudes towards it once they are feed the information about cyanide being a chemical weapon. In short, it is a poll of how people’s attitudes change and one of the basic beliefs of the doctors doing the study is that there is no such thing as a safe level of exposure to cigerette smoke. Even exposure for a millisecond is dangerous.

It seems our cousins across the Pond are considering drastic action:

Britain is considering a ban on “happy hour” discounts at bars and restaurants to curb drinking, a spokesman said Saturday, as health advocates warned that a rise in liver-related deaths among young people may signal a future epidemic.

Health officials will decide on whether to ban the happy hours — designated times for discount drinks — once an independent policy review is published in coming weeks, a health department spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity.

The proposal was one of several aimed at stemming a trend in binge drinking in recent years, particularly among teenagers and young adults. The government also plans to spend 10 million pounds ($15 million) on a new public awareness campaign, and wants to improve enforcement of laws against underage drinking.

Is this problem really one of people not understanding that consuming large amounts of alcohol along with fatty foods is unhealthful?  Or rather people opting for short term pleasure at the risk of long term harm?

via a very concerned Mary Katharine Ham

California will become the first state in the Union to ban trans fats in restaurants and other public food facilities if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs into into law a bill passed by the state legislature Monday. Schwarzenegger has yet to announce his position publicly but he did sign a ban on trans fats in public school cafeterias last year.

Michelle Malkin wants to know, “Will Gov. Schwarzenegger actually sign this junk science meddle-gislation? Is this the kind of ‘rebranding’ of the Republican Party Schwarzenegger wants the national GOP to adopt?” It’s a fair question.

Such laws are a ridiculous overreach, in my view.  Dan Walters is right to worry about legislatures reacting to the latest scientific headlines rather than waiting for conclusive research.

Almost any product, activity or lifestyle in a modern society (sky diving, unprotected sex or crossing the street, for instance) poses some kind of theoretical risk, which means that life is a series of choices between competing values and impulses.

Trans fats, for instance, were developed to allow vegetable oils to replace animal fat, such as lard, in foods on the assumption that they would be healthier, but recent research indicates that they have health effects of their own, especially in raising levels of so-called “bad cholesterol.” But would banning them encourage restaurants to shift to even more questionable fats, such as palm oil, or return to lard? Potential consequences are rarely considered in the Capitol.

Indeed.

The silver lining here is that this is, after all, California we’re talking about.  The Golden State is often on the cutting edge of legislative experimentation, often setting a trend years or even decades before others follow.  Sometimes, they get it spectacularly wrong.  The beauty of federalism, though, is that the several states can serve as laboratories for these measures as their local cultures dictate.

A little over two years ago I blogged about the Jean Charles De Menezes shooting by the Metropolitan Police (the Met) in the London underground. The Met believed, mistakenly, that De Menezes was a terrorist and shot him in the head in a crowded subway train. Well now it turns out that a court has ruled that the De Menezes shooting was not in policy.

The Metropolitan police was today found guilty of a catastrophic series of errors during the operation that led to firearms officers shooting Jean Charles de Menezes dead on the London underground.

[...]

De Menezes was shot seven times in the head by police who mistook him for one of four men who had failed to detonate bombs on the capital’s transport system the previous day, the court heard during the four-week trial.

The prosecution alleged that the police operation to follow and stop the 27-year-old – who lived in the same south London block of flats as the terror suspect Hussein Osman – was carried out “so badly that the public were needlessly put at risk”.

One rather disturbing part of the verdict is that apparently nobody really was to blame though. The head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair was not in anyway responsible. The commander of the operation was not responsible for getting a many killed, she was promoted. It isn’t clear that the officer who was supposed to be watching for when De Menezes was leaving and going to the bathroom was responsible for failure to do his job. Apparently the police screwed up by not having any single officer anywhere involved in the operation screwing up. It was wrong to shoot De Menezes in the head multiple times, but nobody really made a mistake. Try to figure that one out.

This article in the Telegraph raises similar issues.

So how did the mistakes happen? The verdict blamed “the organisation” and “managerial failures”. Yet no individual manager was deemed responsible for any managerial failure, or for any failure of the organisation.

How any such failures could have happened without some individual making an error, either at the level of policy, or at the level of an individual decision, is beyond me. But I’m in good company: the prosecution, the judge and the jury couldn’t resolve that condundrum either.

The article then goes off the rails after that though,

The prosecution seems to have been the consequence of a vague desire to ensure that the “same thing does not happen again”. Its most likely effect, however, is that something much worse will.

When applied to the police and the other emergency services, health and safety legislation induces paralysis. It does not make officers do the right thing. It makes them do nothing, because you cannot be prosecuted for doing nothing.

I’m sorry, but we are giving certain agents of the state broad powers and arming them and then sending them out with instructions to shoot people if necessary. I’d like to make sure that, as an innocent bystander, I don’t get shot, my wife doesn’t get shot, and so on. Is that really too much to ask? Given that we are, once again, arming these agents, giving them broad powers to detain, arrest and shoot people, asking them to perform at a high standard seems like a reasonable request.

In the case of dealing with terrorism, the consequences of officers doing nothing could be horrendous.

Yes, it could very well be horrendous. It also could very well be part of the cost of living in a free society. Pushed to its extremes this is the kind of thinking that leads to the nanny state mentality. We must protect people from not only the bad guys, but themselves as well. After all, unbridled excesses in eating has been claimed to lead to 400,000 premature deaths due to obesity.¹
_____
¹Not really, but it sure does sound horrendous; horrendous enough that the government should step in and do something about it.

Michael Kinsley argues that the intellectual positions of the two major parties are incoherent and concludes that libertarians “are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.”

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don’t. And if you don’t, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe “foreign entanglements,” and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America’s help. They don’t care–or at least they don’t think the government should care–about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed.

[...]

Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it’s the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

[...]

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money’s on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul–one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby–raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society–nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

The problem with this thesis is that most indications point to a more communitarian government rather than a more libertarian one. Socialized medicine is happening incrementally but its rise is inexorable. Social Security isn’t going away and now that the Baby Boomers are starting to collect it’ll become an even bigger program.

Yes, we’ll likely become more free in some ways, with society becoming more friendly to gays, sexual license, and perhaps even recreational drug use. But we’ll be less free in all manner of other ways as the nanny state regulates all manner of formerly private activities and as the information age makes privacy a much less widespread commodity.

Steve Bainbridge, guesting for Andrew Sullivan, has a longish post claiming that George W. Bush has “set back the conservative movement for years, if not decades, by betraying conservative principles,” most notably by a lack of fiscal discipline and a wasteful war in Iraq. Interestingly, the vehicle he chooses for this is a Russell Kirk speech about George H.W. Bush referring to the first Gulf War, which seems simply bizarre in its original context but prudent in the present.

This follows on the heels of another post, an oldie-but-goodie, which puts up Kirk’s famous “10 principles of conservatism.” I subscribe to 7 or 8 of them, demurring only on Custom, Prescription and, depending on how it’s construed, Enduring Moral Order. (There’s a lot of redundancy in the list; he was apparently straining to come up with a neat list of 10.) Then again, those are the first three listed principles.

While I can’t vouch for his heart or his mind, I would argue that George W. Bush is a conservative who emphasizes those first three principles but seems not to care so much about most of the remaining seven. He has a strong sense of morality but, unlike traditional conservatives, believes in perfectability especially — and quite oddly — in foreign policy.

Most obviously, he’s deficient in this one:

Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. … Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away.

And, motivated by his strong belief that he’s right, he often turns a blind eye to this one:

The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. … It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. … A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Now, whether all this has caused long-term harm to the conservative moment is debatable. For one thing, “conservative” is a moving target, Kirk’s devotion to an idyllic past notwithstanding. The United States, and the West generally, has been moving inexorably toward a welfare state for decades now and our standards of morality constantly evolve, too.

Still, Bainbridge is right:

We controlled the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary between 2002 and 2004, but what was accomplished? Did government get smaller? Did we hack away at the nanny state? Were the unborn any more protected? Did we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority? No on all counts.

Still, given the razor thin majorities in Congress and the polarization that accompanied the 2000 election aftermath, it’s doubtful a Ronald Reagan could have achieved those things. On the other hand, Bush didn’t much try, except perhaps on abortion.

Recall that Bush campaigned on a platform of “compassionate conservatism,” applying a modifier to persuade people that he wasn’t a heartless meanie like Newt Gingrich. Partly out of lack of conviction, partly out of crash electoral politics, partly because he stepped into a budding recession, and partly because of the fallout of 9/11 Bush presided over a massive expansion in the size of government. Still, few people are complaining about the increased federal involvement in education and health care; indeed, they’re clamoring for more.

Bush has certainly harmed the Republican Party, contributing mightily to the loss of both Houses of Congress in the most recent midterm election (with plenty of help from his counterparts in the legislature) and making it much harder for a Republican to win the White House in 2008. It’s not clear, however, that conservatism per se has suffered any long term damage.

It’s illegal for Manhattan real estate brokers to tell people that a given building or neighborhood is “family friendly” or, indeed, to give any sort of demographic information that might help steer people to a place they might like, Vivian Toy explains.

WHAT kind of people live in this building?” That is often the first question brokers are asked by apartment hunters — be they couples with children, retirees seeking peace and quiet or 20-somethings prone to the occasional raucous party. But in recent months, thousands of brokers have learned that in answering that question, they might just be breaking the law. Many real estate ads, for instance, use “family friendly” to describe large apartments. But according to a strict interpretation of federal, state and local fair-housing laws, that is illegal.

“If a family with children wants to know if there are other children the same age in a building, we’re supposed to say, ‘You should stand outside the building between 2 and 5 p.m. and see who walks in,’ ” said Michele Kleier, the president of Gumley Haft Kleier. “But how do you say something like that with a straight face?”

[...]

Real estate lawyers say there are lots of other descriptions and terms that could trigger discrimination lawsuits, prompting many brokers to watch what they say in front of clients and to scour their ads for risky words. Unacceptable terms include “adult community,” “bachelor pad,” “near churches” and “no children.” Lawyers also warn against listing specific school districts and using catchphrases like “great for families,” “nanny’s room,” “quality neighborhood” and “senior housing.”

[...]

Mr. Garfinkel goes on to warn brokers that they should not identify the school districts where apartments are located. This, despite the fact that real estate ads often boast that an address is zoned for top-rated schools like P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side or P.S. 234 in TriBeCa. He said that while it is all right to name a school district when specifically asked, the fact should not be advertised because some school districts have distinctive racial compositions and advertising the district could be seen as a way of expressing preference for a specific race. Brokers are often stunned by this prohibition, he said, “but I’m a lawyer, and I’m going by the strict letter of the law.”

[...]

The brokers were in for some surprises. Mr. Garfinkel explained that to follow the city law regarding occupations, they should not ask people what they do for a living. “I think that blew everybody’s mind,” Mr. James said. “I don’t think we’ve recovered from that yet.”

[...]

The antidiscrimination sheet falls far short of the disclosure that would be necessary if the City Council passes the law on co-op rejections. Nearly two-thirds of the members of the City Council have signed on as co-sponsors, but the council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, has said she opposes the bill since existing housing discrimination laws already offer redress. The proposed law would require co-op boards to provide a written explanation for any board rejection and to reveal the source of any negative information it received about a prospective buyer. Boards could be fined if they did not provide this information within five days of their decision.

[...]

In addition to seminars for brokers, Corcoran’s efforts include a computer program that automatically screens property listings for unacceptable language. “Some words get completely blocked, and others flash a warning on your screen,” Ms. Liebman said. “It’s a huge list of words, but we have zero tolerance for violations.”

Simply bizarre. Indeed, why enforcing fair housing laws would be the responsibility of a real estate agent is beyond me. Their job is to provide information to their clients. Landlords and sellers are not allowed to discriminate against applicants in certain protected classes but prospective renters and buyers certainly have the right to chose to live among people they’re comfortable with. It’s perfectly reasonable for those with small children to want to live around families and for childless or elderly couples who want peace and quiet to avoid the same. Why shouldn’t their agents be able to give them the information necessary to make that decision?

Via Andrew Sullivan, who terms this “busy body hell.”

Today many of our “leaders” take on the character of bing a moralistic busybody. Take for example, Senator Hillary Clinton’s view on television and video games.

And so we know that left to their own devices, you have to keep upping the ante on violence because people do get desensitized and children are going to want more and more stimulation. And unfortunately in a free market like ours, what sells will become even more violent, and the companies will ratchet up the violence in order to increase ratings and sales figures. It is a little frustrating when we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to violence and increased aggression that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response.

Allowing one’s children to play violent video games isn’t merely an issue of good vs. bad parenting, but a public health issue. This is one of the new ways of casting any type of activity that some people enjoy that others don’t and it is the focus of this article by Jacob Sullum. Also, the idea that the market is running rough shod on this issue is somewhat dubious. The above ignores the role of parents in the process. If an adult wants to play a violent video game, that is one thing, but the objection seems to be children playing these games. One has to ask, where are the parents? It seems to me that the objection by the good Senator from New York is as much about lousy parenting skills of many parents as it is about the content of the video games. Why not put forward a law to incarcerate bad parents, or fine them, or some other type of law dealing with the problem from that end?

[Aside: It may seem like I'm picking on Senator Clinton, but I see this problem all over the place with Republicans and Democrats alike.]

What do these four “public health” problems—smoking, playing violent video games, overeating, and gambling—have in common? They’re all things that some people enjoy and other people condemn, attributing to them various bad effects. Sometimes these effects are medical, but they may also be psychological, behavioral, social, or financial. Calling the habits that supposedly lead to these consequences “public health” problems, “epidemics” that need to be controlled, equates choices with diseases, disguises moralizing as science, and casts meddling as medicine. It elevates a collectivist calculus of social welfare above the interests of individuals, who become subject to increasingly intrusive interventions aimed at making them as healthy as they can be, without regard to their own preferences.

This pretty much nails it for me. It is some sort of puritanical hold over that what one group thinks is bad is therefore bad for everybody no matter what. It isn’t any different than the temperance movements from late in the 1800’s to the early 1900’s that ultimately gave us Prohibition.

And we can look at Prohibition to get some ideas of what might happen if these moralistic busybodies get their way. When Prohibition first went into effect it first looked like a success. The number of bars dropped off dramatically. The number of alcohol related deaths dropped by quite a bit (see update). Issues related to public drunkeness and other crimes dropped as well. Then speakeasies opened up and soon in many places the number of speakeasies out stripped the number of bars just before prohibition. The number of alcohol related deaths increased and surpassed its previous levels as now there was less quality control and people more often that before Prohibition drank adulterated alcoholic beverages. Eventually enforcing Prohibition and the problems that grew out of it became so costly that certain cities like New York passed laws that police were to not enforce Prohibition laws. Even the increasing expenditures on enforcing Prohibition are now viewed by all but he most die hard law-and-order types as a social waste.

Typically public health issues refer to things that impact people when people have no choice in the matter. Influenza is a good example of a public health issue. I have no say in whether or not I get sick. As such, there is indeed a potential role for government to play in these kind of events. Subsidizing vaccines for certain diseases is a good government policy since if less people have the disease, there are fewer people to spread the disease and the probability of contracting the disease also declines.

Things like playing poker, watching a violent movie, or drinking alcohol on the other hand are all choices. And when it comes to children parents have the ability to make these choices for their children. But the moralistic busybodies want to treat all of us as children, they want to be the ones making the choices. They want to control what we eat, drink, how much we exercise, and what we watch and what we do for fun and recreation. No more McDonalds, go for a 2 mile walk, don’t gamble, don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke. Look out, that cell phone might give you a brain tumor or make you sterile. Pretty soon there will be some member of Congress putting forward legislation for a national bed time to ensure that people get enough sleep every night. People are so worried about methamphetamines that people with bad allergies have to now worry about going to jail for treating their allergies. We actually have some of these Nanny Staters suggesting that we prohibit running on play grounds at schools since 17 kids die and 200,000 are injured on average each year. It is an epidemic you see. And at the same time we are facing a national epidemic for obesity…but just don’t run, jump, or swim to battle your bulging gut, you might trip and fall or drown.

This concern for all these faux “epidemics” is basically a long slow slide into less and less freedoms. Where we can’t do things we enjoy because they could lead to one of these “epidemics” that politicians of all stripes seem to find so abhorrent. And we can’t have that. So no more drinking alcohol, no more eating a cheeseburger, no more smoking, no more sex, no more television, and for God’s sake protect the children.

Update: Dave Schuler pointed out in comments that deaths related to alcohol dropped prior to Prohibition and hence it wasn’t a benefit of prohibition. However, one of the arguments of the Prohibitionists was that a policy of prohibition would prevent a rise in the number of alcohol related deaths. This was not the case, with Prohibition the number of alcohol related deaths returned to its pre-WWI levels. Dave argues that this was probably going to happen anyways due to Persistence Theory. While this might have happened, the point is still valid that Prohibition did nothing to stop this and may have made the problem worse. The Cato link above notes that the alcohol related deaths did not rise, and in some cases actually fell, in countries like Denmark, Ireland and Great Britain in the 1920s.

Nicolas Sarkozy has won the French presidency, which is good news for the United States and bad news for European socialism. The NYT:

Nicolas Sarkozy, the passionate, pugnacious son of a Hungarian immigrant, was elected president of France on Sunday, promising a break with the past, a new style of leadership, and a renewal of relations with the United States and the rest of Europe.

Mr. Sarkozy’s triumph over Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, was a huge blow to her party and dashed her dream of becoming the country’s first female president. But Ms. Royal tried to rally her supporters, telling them French politics had forever changed with her candidacy.

With the entire vote counted, Mr. Sarkozy had 53.1 percent and Ms. Royal 46.9 percent, according to official Interior Ministry figures. Ms. Royal had repeatedly appealed to the women of France to vote for her in a show of female solidarity. But Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative who made his reputation as a hard-line minister of the interior, got the majority of the women’s vote, according to Ipsos, an international polling company.

Royal can take some comfort, though, in seeing the Islamist uprisings she predicted come to fruition:

His victory set off scattered anti-Sarkozy violence in Paris and some other cities, but for the most part France stayed calm.

The results were overwhelming and appear likely to change French politics permanently.

Turnout was exceptionally high. Eighty-four percent of France’s 44.5 million registered voters cast ballots, about four percentage points higher than the level five years ago.

In an emotional acceptance speech to thousands of cheering supporters in a rented concert hall in the chic Eighth Arrondissement, Mr. Sarkozy (pronounced SAR-ko-zee) renewed his campaign pledge to break what he called the old, outmoded habits of France. “The French people have chosen change,” Mr. Sarkozy declared. “I will implement that change. Because that is the mandate I received and because France needs change.”

He vowed to “break with the ideas, the habits and the behavior of the past” and to “rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect and merit.” Mr. Sarkozy has pledged to remake France by, among other things, slashing unemployment, cutting taxes, keeping trains running during strikes, making people work harder and longer, shrinking the government bureaucracy, reforming pension rules and making it easier to create new businesses.

Widely criticized in France for his strong pro-American sentiments, Mr. Sarkozy sought in his acceptance speech to strike a balanced approach to the United States. Addressing France’s “American friends,” he said, “I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.” He specifically criticized the United States for obstructing the fight against global warming, which he said would be a high priority.

If this comes true, it will be huge:

“The voters have spoken,” Ms. Royal said. “I hope the next president will fulfill his mission in the service of all the French people.” But she also said the election campaign had changed the French left forever, hinting at disarray in her party and suggesting the Socialists may seek to form an alliance with the large following of François Bayrou, the centrist candidate. “Something rose up that will not stop,” she said, adding, “You can count on me to deepen the renewal of the left.”

TIME’s Bruce Crumley gives some indication, at least, of the difficulty Royal faces in implementing that:

“No one seriously is considering continuing the disastrous seduction of centrists,” warned Jean-Luc Mélanchon, a member of the Socialist Party’s hard left flank. “It’s clear that to avoid the right sweeping again, the Socialist Party will have to refocus and regroup, and bond with the wider left to win as many seats in parliament as possible,” agree Socialist official Henri Weber. “That will be overseen by members of the party’s leadership.”

FT’s Martin Arnold believes some sort of upheaval is coming, though:

Let the finger-pointing begin. Ségolène Royal’s defeat on Sunday night left the French Socialist party in disarray and searching for someone to blame. There is hardly a shortage of scapegoats.

It is the party’s third consecutive presidential defeat. The Socialists now face the question of whether they can ever regain power without ditching their anti-capitalist rhetoric, as the mainstream left has done across almost all of Europe.

[...]

”The left is not credible on so many issues, from the 35-hour working week to immigration and law and order,” says Dominique Reynié, professor at Sciences Po university. “It is the fault of the left collectively. Ever since their [parliamentary election] defeat in 1983 they have never questioned their fundamental ideology, only thinking they needed to change tactics,” he says.

That’s a phenomenon Americans are familiar with, too, (see Mark Tapscott for the latest examples) but our parties do tend to reinvent themselves after successive election defeats.

Ironically, the current French “double ballot” electoral system was put in place to end the “crisis and compromise” of the old proportional representation system. In theory, and often in practice, the first round of elections allowed French citizens to vote for niche parties tailored to their political ideologies and then a natural choice between center-left and center-right consensus candidates in the second ballot. In the last two elections, though, the alterative choices were extremist parties, whether Le Pen’s radical National Front or Royale’s unreconstructed Socialists. Neither is particularly appealing as a governing party, regardless of how much fun they might be on the stump.

If Royal can forge a post-election alliance with the Centrists — which is a big If, given that she couldn’t do it between the first and second ballots — then large-S Socialism in France may be dead forever. Small-s socialism, in the sense of a cradle to grave nanny state, isn’t going anywhere.

Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at the liberal American Prospect, takes to the conservative editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to decry the “Girls Gone Wild” problem and call for a nanny state solution: “It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21 — consent, in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.”

It is true that teenagers become legal adults at the age of 18, right around the time they graduate from high school. The age of consent to serve in the armed forces is also 18 (17 with parental consent), as is the minimum voting age since 1971, when an amendment to the Constitution lowered it from 21. But the federal government is already happy to bar legal adults from engaging in certain activities. Most notably, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 raised the drinking age to 21 (by threatening to withhold highway funds from states that did not go along). In practice, the age limit is flouted on college campuses and in private homes. But it has still had a positive effect, not least by driving down fatalities from drunk driving.

A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery — that is, for participating in pornography — would most likely operate in the same way, sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world’s next Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of “talent.” And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself — long since routinized — but its “barely legal” category. “Girls Gone Wild”–like its counterparts on the Web–is treated as a kind of joke. It isn’t. There ought to be a law.

The problem she’s trying to solve here is not all that clear. Garance is worried about the “transform[ation of] the playful exhibitionism of young women into scarlet letters that follow them around for life.” Yet, she contends that it is “socially acceptable for a freshman at, say, Ohio State — living in a dorm room in Columbus like thousands of freshmen before her — to participate in soft-core porn.” If so, where’s the scarlet letter?

Let’s presume, though, that “going wild” on video actually has not yet become socially acceptable. Indeed, I rather hope that’s the case. How old does one have to be to decide whether to buck social norms for fun, fame, fortune, or foolishness?

In expanded thoughts on her own site, Garance notes that “our laws recognize that maturity comes slowly,” with different age thresholds required for voting, drinking, serving as Representative, Senator, and President. Any “age of consent” line is arbitrary in the particular no matter how scientific it is in the aggregate. Yet we draw lines anyway.

Still, the idea that a 20-year-old woman isn’t responsible for the consequences of getting drunk and flashing her private parts for a strange man with a camera — and then signing a consent form — is hard to swallow.

For one thing, plenty of women are mothers by that age, responsible for the welfare of helpless infants. Surely, that’s a notch or two higher on the difficulty scale than remembering to keep one’s shirt pulled down? Indeed, it was not all that long ago that girls were getting married and having children at 13 and 14.

While we’re on the subject of child bearing, we should recall that girls well under 18 are permitted to have abortions every day, even without parental notification. For that matter, they’re allowed to bring their child to term and give them up for adoption. Or, for that matter, to keep the child and raise it to adulthood. Either way, those decisions will “follow them around for life,” too.

I’m not the first to point out the incongruity of people being eligible to join the military at 18 and yet deeming them insufficiently responsible to make other choices until 21. Until we abolished the peacetime draft, we routinely conscripted men into service at 18. The average age of the soldiers we sent to Vietnam was 19. Far more of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq were 21 or younger (974 of them as of March 24), than any other age bracket. Jessica Lynch was 19 when she was taken prisoner. Audie Murphy was 20 on the day he earned the Medal of Honor.

Ezra Klein agrees that taking freedom away from 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old women isn’t the answer but feels something must be done to protect them when they’re drunk, naked, and stupid. He suggests making it illegal to film nude women while they’re “severely impaired” or imposing “a waiting period between signing consent and making your porn so the effects of haste and intoxication are blunted.”

I suspect, however, that Ezra would be in favor of prosecuting 20-year-olds who get drunk and shoot people. Or get drunk and drive? Indeed, we have been ratcheting up the penalties for drunk driving while lowering the threshold as to what constitutes “drunk” for a quarter century now.

Perhaps we should just make it illegal for people under 21 to purchase and consume alcohol? Well, actually, we did that. During the Reagan administration.

We send 18-year-olds off to kill and risk death. We hold them responsible for crimes. Even if they’re drunk. Yet they’re deemed too immature to remember not to flash their boobies at a camera? How insane is that?

At some point, people are responsible for their own actions. I’d suggest that 18 is well past old enough to know when to keep your clothes on.

UPDATE: Jon Swift thinks GFR’s proposal doesn’t go far enough.

Can a girl of 21 really know what she is consenting to when she signs a release form for a pornographer? Does she really understand what the ramifications might be later in life? That is why I propose that we raise the minimum age of consent to participate in pornography to 65.

He fully explores the ramifications of that change at the link.

No, really. Here is a really, really good reason NOT to buy compact flourescent bulbs (CFLs).

On that Tuesday, Bridges was installing one of the spiral-shaped light bulbs in her 7-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Suddenly, the bulb plummeted to the floor, breaking on the shag carpet.

Bridges, who was wary of the dangers of cleaning up a fluorescent bulb, called The Home Depot where she purchased them. She was told that the bulbs had mercury in them and that she should not vacuum the area where the bulb had broken. Bridges was directed to call the Poison Control hotline.

[...]

Upon reaching the DEP the next day, the agency offered to send a specialist out to Bridges’ house to test the air levels. The specialist arrived soon after the phone conversation and began testing the downstairs, where he found safe levels of mercury — below the state’s limit of 300 ng/m3 (nanograms per cubic meter).

In the daughter’s bedroom, the levels remained well below the 300 mark, except for near the carpet where the bulb broke. There the mercury levels spiked to 1,939 ng/m3. On a bag of toys that bulb fragments had landed on, the levels of mercury were 556 ng/m3.

Bridges was told by the specialist not to clean up the bulb and mercury powder by herself. He recommended the Clean Harbors Environmental Services branch in Hampden.

Clean Harbors gave Bridges a low-ball estimate of $2,000, based on what she described, to clean up the room properly. The work entailed removing anything with levels greater than 300 ng/m3, including the carpeting.

One month later, Bridges’ daughter’s bedroom remains sealed off with plastic “to avoid any dust blowing around” and to keep the family’s pets from going in and out of the room.

So much for saving money on her energy bill. Whatever she was going to save she has spent several times over. Not only has she spent quite a bit out of pocket, but also in lost time as well,

One month later, Bridges is still searching for answers. She has contacted staff members from the offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) to tell them about her situation but has received no response.

She has talked with representatives from the CDC and DEP and spent roughly two to three hours a day over the past several weeks, talking on the phone and in person and contacting local papers to get the word out on what she believes are dangerous light bulbs.

Let me see, if we assume it is 2 hours a day Monday through Friday for four weeks that is 40 hours or one entire work week wasted. Assuming say $15/hour that is $600 wasted in dealing with one borken CFL.

Of course, in actuality it is all a big steaming pile of Barvo Sierra.

State Toxicologist Andrew Smith said it would be unlikely that a person could contract mercury poisoning from the levels of mercury found in Bridges’ daughter’s room.

“In this situation, my understanding, was this 1,900 was the sign reading right at the spot of the floor where the bulb broke,” said Smith. “While 1,900 was certainly considered an elevated reading of mercury vapor, it was a very localized level that I would not expect to result in any sign of mercury exposure.”

Smith said mercury is only dangerous with long-term exposure and in this case the person would have to stay right at the spot of the 1,900 reading or there would have to be elevated levels of mercury vapor in the breathing zone — about 3 feet — above the spill. Mercury also dissipates over time.

The air in the bedroom at the 3-foot level measured between 31 to 49 ng/m3 of mercury, depending on the location.

Smith said a CFL light bulb breaking is not in the same category as when a mercury thermometer breaks.

Yay for the Nanny State!

Cleaning up a broken CFL bulb is actually pretty simple. Wear disposable coveralls (or old clothes that can be disposed of), protective eyewear, cloves and a dust mask, and make sure the room is well ventilated. Place the broken glass in a closed container and clean the dust with either two pieces of stiff paper, a disposable broom and dust-pan or a commerical mercury cleaning kit. Dispose of the dust, the glass and cleaning implements as “universal waste” (like a computer and flourescent blubls).

Of course it sounds like the lady in the story, Brandy Bridges, got ripped off and the Department of Environmental Protection was in large part to blame. After all, when somebody shows up from the government with a special device and tells you to get the help of a professional cleaning company that will carry lots of weight with many people.

Part of the blame, in my view, also can be placed on the environmentalists. For years the mantra has been “Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad.” Now, when there is a minute amount of mercury in something that breaks in the house, get the Hazmat team in there on the double! Afterall mercury causes all sorts of horrible things and even a miniscule amount can do untold damage (not really).

Link coutesy of Debunkers.