Charles Marohn, writing at Strong Towns, has a post entitled “The Lexus Lane.”

His opening grabbed my attention:

I penned an opinion piece in the Minnesota Daily about congestion pricing back when I was an undergraduate in civil engineering school. At that point in my life I believed – like most Americans today believe – that gas taxes pay for the cost of highways, that any lack of funding was due to bloated bureaucrats taking money from roads to pay for other things and that rural areas generated most of the revenue in the system. If that article surfaced today, it may be a bit scandalous, especially given how much my understanding has changed over the years.

So, here today, he’s trying to come up with good policies to generate and allocate revenue for transportation in a optimal way. Too much, he figures, is being spent on building and maintaining roads with under-used capacity and not enough – I suppose – for roads with over-used capacity.

He suggests:

Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.Putting a price, not just on the lane but on the time of day that lane is used, and then sequestering those funds for the ongoing maintenance and improvement of that lane, will allow the market to send a clear signal for what the high-returning investments are. This clear signal would be free of any politician, bureaucrat or interest group. Elegant.

With that approach, I see a system that would ultimately be always slightly congested for everyone, but slightly less congested for the wealthy. Still, it’s worth thinking about. We need good transportation policy and good ways of figuring out where to put limited dollars.

Austin Frakt, writing in The Incidental Economist, has a good post on studies that have provided some insight into “job lock” caused by our health care policies. This is the latest in a series of posts along these lines and this one deals specifically with “entrepreneurship lock.” In other words, do people forego starting and running their own businesses because they need healthcare through another employer.

The preponderance of evidence from the literature is that “entrepreneurship lock” exists, though there are varying estimates of its extent.

I’ve always thought health care and employers go together like fish and bicycles. I would have preferred that Obamacare go further in decoupling the two things.

The Indiana Law Blog raises an interesting point that I’ve found mildly irritating for years. The underlying post is about Speaker Bosma’s request for an opinion about whether Rep. Turner violated ethics laws or other authorities by lobbying for a family member’s nursing home business. But that led Ethics Committee chairperson Rep. Steuerwald to voice concerns about the investigation potentially running up against confidentiality concerns with legislative caucuses.

Legislative caucuses are, generally speaking, where members of the same political party in a chamber (e.g. House Republicans, Senate Democrats) meet behind closed doors to discuss strategy.

Generally speaking, I think private discussions have some utility. For example, members can speak their mind without fearing that some poorly articulated nuance is going to be thrown in their face at the next political campaign. So, I’m not entirely against these private discussions. My gripe is that the General Assembly does not extend the same privilege to other public bodies. Under the Open Door Law, other boards, commissions, departments and offices exercising administrative, judicial or legislative power aren’t entitled to meet in private to hash out a decision in advance.

Whatever standard the General Assembly applies to itself should also be applied to other state and local boards and commissions. It’s a goose and gander thing.

Sen. Delph has been hitting the Twittersphere again. This time he’s complaining of media bias and wondering if objective journalism permits a journalist to hold an opinion on something and still report about it.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion but you can’t report on it if you have taken a position. That’s the barrier that shouldn’t be crossed.

For example, if a journalist pays taxes and doesn’t like paying taxes, the journalist should not be reporting on legislation that affects tax policy. And, clearly, a journalist who does not want to be murdered and holds strong opinions on that subject has no business reporting on homicides.

But, instead of tax policy or crime, Sen. Delph seems to be focused on social issues, gay marriage in particular. Those journalists who favor it apparently should not report on the issue.

Personally, I think the pretense of “objective journalism” has harmed the profession to some degree. A person is always going to have biases of one sort or another. Recognizing them, mitigating them, and disclosing them are fair goals. Hiding them and pretending they don’t exist can be pernicious. There are degrees, obviously. A journalist who has been paid off by Monsanto and reporting on agriculture policy is worse than a journalist in an upper income bracket reporting on minimum wage policy. But both have biases. It’s part of the human condition. Ignoring that fact leads to a useless kind of “he said, she said” journalism. “Senator says moon is made of green cheese, climate change is a hoax, Scientists disagree.”

As a reader, where possible, it’s helpful to get to know the reputation of the journalist and the sources and get a sense of how reliable and candid they are. That’s one benefit of continuity of journalists at a paper.

In any event, media bias is where you look for it. From the perspective of a social conservative with litmus tests based on things like marriage equality and reproductive rights, media figures probably look like a cabal of left wing loonies. If you’re an economic liberal, looking at media figures through a lens of economic justice, the media probably looks like a bunch of sycophants to the monied elite. If you’re a pacifist, the media probably often looks like little more than a soapbox for congenital saber rattlers.

One thing I think we can all agree on though is that the only source of perfectly objective news and commentary is here at Masson’s Blog.

I have, at times, described my political instincts as a mix of libertarianism and utilitarianism. My libertarian bona fides are in serious question these days, but lets run with it for the moment. Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton has a post today that puts those two ways of approaching policy in serious tension.

Piketty says that wealth distributions skewed to the top decile reduces economic growth, and now the IMF reports the same is true of skewed income distributions.

Good news! Giving free money to poor people is good for the economy! Legislation establishing confiscatory estate taxes and setting up a government jobs program fixing infrastructure must be in the works!

I was sort of glib with my title. I don’t suppose “liberty” would be the particular focus, but more of a natural right to property. But, I guess Libertarians do the same to some extent. Their concern is perhaps generally with “liberty” but they spend most of their time on property rights with liberty rights being in more of a soft focus.

But, for argument’s sake, what if the premise is correct: that confiscating property from dead people and giving it to poor people was very beneficial to the economy? But, let’s also say there is a natural right of dead people to give property to their children.

What’s a policymaker to do in that situation? Honor the property rights of the recently deceased or promote the utility of the living?

I expect you probably go with the mixed bag we’ve had in the past. The government takes some and leaves some alone. And we haggle endlessly over the proper balance.

I think I’ve told the story about how, in a college literature class, I raged against a line in “The Catcher in the Rye” that said:

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I see a lot of fantasy persecution on the Internet – second amendment discussions where writers imagine their embrace of firearms is vital to resisting an increasingly tyrannical government. Legal discussions where writers imagine that jury nullification is a vital tool for resisting the abuses of corrupt judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers. Discussions of societal trends where Christians and men’s groups imagine they are the real persecuted victims.

In every case, it seemed to me, the real problem was that the world was not emotionally satisfying to the writer and working within the system would be hard, incomplete, and still emotionally unsatisfying. The reality is that, given a broad enough perspective, we are all more or less interchangeable cogs in a vast universe that will grind along just fine with or without us. That’s a tough situation for an individual ego.

The temptation is to become the hero in one’s own personal narrative. And, being Alexander, cutting the Gordian knot with your sword gives you a better shot of dopamine than being part of a committee tasked with unraveling the damn thing.

But, at some point, most of us have to grow up and do what we can to help the system grind along in a more or less satisfactory manner. It’s not glorious. But it’s a citizen’s duty.

I have read only about five of the ninety-three pages of the opinion, but the Court of Appeals has partially reversed the trial court (pdf) in the State v. IBM litigation over FSSA “modernization.” The Court of Appeals said that IBM is still entitled to about $50 million in assignment and equipment fees. But, the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court, holding that IBM did breach its contract to the FSSA, with the matter being remanded to the trial court to figure out the damages from the breach. The damages will be offset against that $50 million in favor of IBM.

Per the Court of Appeals:

While IBM’s software, computers, and employee training aided in delivering welfare services, the primary focus of the contract was to provide food and medical care to our poorest citizens in a timely, efficient, and reliable manner within federal guidelines, to discourage fraud, and to increase work-participation rates. In the most basic aspect of this contract — providing timely services to the poor — IBM failed. We therefore reverse the trial court’s finding that there was no material breach.

In the State’s defense, it’s not like anyone else saw anything bad coming down the line.

My skeptical sense of the matter was that reducing payouts by inhibiting the delivery of timely services to the poor was more of a feature than a bug to those who were not excited about being obliged to provide those services in the first place.