So, my webhost migrated the server on which this blog is hosted; there was a lag in the propagation, having the consequence that two of my recent posts landed on the old server without migrating to the new one along with everyone else. These were the posts on the Phil Hinkle matter and the Starke County Treasurer. I think I can retrieve them but haven’t done so yet.

On the drive into work this morning, I heard a BBC World Service report on the riots in London and other cities in England. When things get rough like this, it provides a little insight into things we take for granted. In particular, I’m thinking of the basic nature of government.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are two of the bigger thinkers in this arena. I may have not understood them fully when I read them in the first place and less so in the years that have passed since. But, my Cliffs Notes version is that Locke had this vision of government as a social contract where, in a state of nature, people are basically reasonable and tolerant and government is mostly just a way to do things better. Hobbes had a harsher view, where we choose government only because the alternative is worse. The state of nature, Hobbes suggests, is a war of all against all where the life of an individual is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Government is a way of selecting a Leviathan as a sort of super-predator to keep the other predators at bay. You’re at the mercy of the Leviathan, but that’s preferable to hordes of lesser predators.

I tend to think that Hobbes view of the state of nature was the more realistic one. The rioting reinforces this notion. I know there are some who have these cowboy notions that, since they are armed, they can protect their own stuff nicely without the help of the government, thank you very much. But, in the absence of Leviathan, there is just going to be escalation – you and your puny gun is no match for ever larger gangs of armed looters.

That said, government can’t govern efficiently without the bulk of the public being quiescent. In that sense, the consent of the governed is necessary. It seems to me their are two primary paths for obtaining the acquiescence of the governed – overwhelming force by the government, scaring the populace into submission; or, one way or another, making sure the bulk of the governed have a skin in the game — i.e., they benefit from the government and have something to lose if it falls whether it be a loss of protection of their own property; loss of income coming from the government; or something else.

If the government is only protecting the property of other people, and it’s not paying you off; it had best make sure you are afraid, otherwise you’re likely to regard laws and other government dictates with indifference if not disdain.

And, a complete side note on the nature of reporting. That BBC report had the reporter closely interviewing a rioter about why he was doing what he was doing. When the rioter spouted some nonsense, the reporter was quick to press the issue and cross-examine him about seemingly contradictory positions. I could only think that we’d be much better served if reporters were quicker to question the wealthy and powerful in the same fashion.

We’re taking a little vacation out to Rapid City, South Dakota to see some friends. On the way, we stopped at Wall Drug. Wall Drug is one of my favorite American stories. So, you have a drug store in the middle of nowhere where it’s hot and you have a highway through the desolation. I know, let’s put up signs for hundreds of miles, telling folks they’re getting closer, and they can have free ice water! Gradually, I guess they expanded the schlocky crap they had for sale, and before too long, it’s a full blown tourist attraction. Now, of course, they have a giant jackalope.

Anyway, I highly recommend Rapid City and the area for any of those with younger children. We have the added bonus of having some friends of the family who moved from Lafayette to Rapid City, but in general, you have the big one: Mount Rushmore; but there are also plenty of other attractions and reasons to come. Custer State Park, caves, good hiking, lakes, beautiful weather, road side attractions, Reptile Gardens. During the summer, the days are generally hot, and the nights are cool. It’s just beautiful out here.

It’s a bit of a haul to get here though. I love driving through the night – you can cover an immense amount of ground with the rest of the family sleeping. I think it was about 1,000 – 1,100 miles from Lafayette, and we were able to do it in about 17 hours; maybe 18 with a stop for dinner and breakfast at Wall Drug.

Maureen Hayden has a good article about the efforts underway at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to regulate how utility companies handle “vegetation management.”

Utilities are allowed to keep vegetation down in the rights of way through which their power lines run. This is sensible since you don’t want a tree growing into a power line and shorting out the system. But, they don’t have to look at the trees, so they really have no incentive to do a good job. Some companies have been known to practice “tree topping” – basically just knocking off the entire crown – even if doing so wasn’t strictly necessary to preserve the safety of their power lines. If you’re doing a lot of them, it’s probably more labor and time intensive to take time to evaluate each tree.

IURC officials are now in the midst of drafting what they call a “code of conduct” — specific rules detailing how the state’s investor-owned utilities will have to comply with the order that requires them to improve their notification process and generally forbids them from topping trees or removing more than 25 percent of a tree canopy without the property owner’s consent.
. . .
As the IURC investigation revealed, utilities varied significantly in how they approached the pesky problem of trees located too close to power lines. During ice storms and other bad weather, fallen tree limbs that snap power lines are a major cause of power outages.

Testimony from utility officials called in front of the commission showed that some utilities had in-house foresters and had adopted the “best practice” tree-pruning standards set by International Society of Arboriculture.

Other utilities were contracting out the work to private tree-trimmers without regard to the standards. One utility official said that from a utility’s point of view, the “best practice” for vegetation management was to simply remove all trees near power lines.

The 20-month investigation also showed that utilities had different opinions about how far a power line needed to be from a tree to be considered risk-free.

I really despair of my ability to understand people:

Toledo Catholic Bishop Leonard Blair has banned parishes and parochial schools from raising funds for the Susan G. Komen Foundation, citing concerns that the global anti-cancer giant may someday fund embryonic stem-cell research.

Blocking fund raising for anti-cancer efforts for fear that it may someday lead to science?

Having nothing better to do, apparently, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that it knew was dead on arrival in the Senate. It agreed to raise the debt limit contingent on the Congress passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the United States Constitution and sending it on to the states.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

#This specific “crisis” is entirely manufactured. The deadline is self-imposed and can be avoided by passing a one page bill that agrees to raise the debt limit; something that has been done routinely by Republicans and Democrats alike.

#This is not a matter of taking on new obligations. The Congress has already agreed to the spending; right now is whether it is willing to pay for the obligations it previously agreed to.

President Obama and Senate Democrats, as is their wont, have confused compromise with capitulation at nearly every step, agreeing to make cuts to social safety net programs without requiring increased taxes on the wealthy. It’s not clear what the House Republicans have been willing to give up. Personally, I think the Democrats’ negotiating style is stupid. If the other side is making outrageous demands, you make outrageous demands too. If they want a Balanced Budget Amendment, you demand single payer health care. The goal is keeping the “middle” somewhere in the middle.

Update As long as we’ve given up on legislation that can pass and are just offering fantasy amendments to the United States Constitution, Hunter has some suggestions including:

#The South Carolina Port Amendment: Modeled on the 14th amendment, this amendment would state that all future debts incurred by the state of South Carolina in building ports, harbors, theme parks, gigantic gold-plated sphinxes and all other potential coastline projects shall not be questioned. Ever.

#The Ten Dollars Amendment: Whenever Michele Bachmann asks any American for ten dollars, if the aforementioned citizen has ten dollars on their person, they must give it to her.

. . .

#The Ron/Rand Paul SuperAmendment: From the time this amendment’s passage until the eventual death of the named House/Senate members, Ron and Rand Paul shall have veto power over all legislation, the ability to amend previously passed legislation, and the ability to change the Constitution at will. This will be known as “the founders’ intent” and shall be binding. Also, Rand Paul will get a shiny golden crown, but he promises it will be tasteful. Ron Paul would like a new car.

I think maybe they should throw something in there stripping President Obama of his alleged citizenship.

When they make the movie about these debt ceiling negotiations, I expect it to look a lot like this:

Paul Campos over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money offers this extended quote from George Orwell in 1936 which sounds familiar:

I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At that time I had just come back from Burma, where unemployment was only a word, and I had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working again. In their circumstances it was inevitable, at first, that they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame.

When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is part of the order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back streets of Newcastle, should be out of work. Alf Smith is merely one of the quarter million, a statistical unit. But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure. Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment–far worse than any hardship, worsethan the demoralization of enforced idleness, and Only less bad than the physical degeneracy of Alf Smith’s children, born on the P.A.C. Everyone who saw Greenwood’s play Love on the Dole must remember that dreadful moment when the poor, good, stupid working man beats on the table and cries out, ‘O God, send me some work!’ This was not dramatic exaggeration, it was a touch from life. That cry must have been uttered, in almost those words, in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of English homes, during the past fifteen years.

But, I think not again–or at least, not so often. That is the real point: people are ceasing to kick against the pricks. After all, even the middle classes–yes, even the bridge dubs in the country towns–are beginning to realize that there is such a thing as unemployment. The ‘My dear, I don’t believe in all this nonsense about unemployment. Why, onlylast week we wanted a man to weed the garden, and we simply couldn’t get one. They don’t want to work, that’s all it is!’ which you heard at every decent tea-table five years ago, is growing perceptibly less frequent. As for the working class themselves, they have gained immensely in economic knowledge. I believe that the Daily Worker has accomplished a great deal here: its influence is out of all proportion to its circulation. But in any case they have had their lesson well rubbed into them, not only because unemployment is so widespread but because it has lasted so long. When people live on the dole for years at a time they grow used to it, and drawing the dole, though it remains unpleasant, ceases to be shameful. Thus the old, independent, workhouse-fearing tradition is undermined, just as the ancient fear of debt is undermined by the hire-purchase system. In the back streets of Wigan and Barnsley I saw every kind of privation, but I probably saw much less conscious misery than I should have seen ten years ago. The people have at any rate grasped that unemployment is a thing they cannot help. It is not only Alf Smith who is out of work now; Bert Jones is out of work as well, and both of them have been ‘out’ for years. It makes a great deal of difference when things are the same for everybody.

In the collections business, I get to see the full spectrum of the unemployed. Shiftless bums exist, but they are not the majority. Poor planners are a good deal more representative, about equal with the sick and disabled. And there are plenty who are just getting beaten around by the world through no particular failing of their own — that portion seems to have increased significantly from where it was when I started in 1999.

I’m not going to give any specifics, so this post will likely be next to useless; but, I have to confess a certain sympathy with employers when it comes to labor laws. Regular readers of this blog doubtless have me pegged as a lefty, and I do favor laws that have the effect of keeping wages up and promoting a vibrant middle class.

That said, the labor laws I’ve had to wrestle with as an attorney seem to be very technical in their application. By which I mean, it feels as if an employer can get tagged even if the employee was a screw up and the employer was doing their best to abide by the law. In fact, I get the feeling that good employers, on a dollar-to-damage-caused basis, make out a lot worse than bad employers who actively try to screw their employees.

Additionally, the statutory language tends toward the archaic. The relevant laws seem to have been passed in the 30s and not much has changed since then. The end result is that good workers don’t have a lot of protection and bad workers can tie employers in knots if they’re determined to litigate in bad faith.

I guess that’s about all I have to say at the moment without going into a dissertation or talking about any specific cases.

Everyone and their dog has an opinion on the national debt, debt ceiling, and deficit issue; so I probably don’t have a lot to add. But, my own take on this is that I could live with deep cuts, even to social programs, so long as there were also significant tax increases on the very wealthy. It’s easy for me to say that, I suppose, since I’m not a beneficiary of any of the major social programs. That’s leaving aside, for the moment, that Keynesian economics suggests that cutting off spending like that in a stagnant economy is a stupid thing to do.

The reason I would insist on increased taxes for the very wealthy is because: a) it ends the deficit and starts reducing the debt that much faster; and b) it helps ensure that the national debt isn’t just being used as a pretext (which it is) to end or limit social programs that some conservative factions never liked in the first place.

Without a corresponding increase in taxes on the wealthy, I get the sense that the dynamic is to keep ratcheting down taxes; gut social security, medicaid, and medicare; not do much at all to address deficits; and generally roll back the New Deal and return us to the status quo of the Gilded Age.