When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We still have a few hours left, but it’s close enough for a Fourth of July post I think. Two-hundred and thirty-four years ago, an inspired group of Englishmen resolved to commit treason against the crown. God love ’em. As it turned out, they did have a better way. I sometimes wonder if I would have joined in their little rebellion. Loyalty is a trait that runs strong in me, so I’m not sure if I would have. But, I’m certainly glad they were successful. We have our warts, to be sure, but so far the U.S. has been a reasonably successful experiment and, I think, a net positive for the world.

Still, I have to admit, the well of feel-good, unthinking, rah, rah patriotism has been poisoned for me. I have witnessed too many attempts to leverage support for the U.S. generally into support for less than great policies. I don’t know if that’s just part of growing up or a bit peculiar to the times in which we live. I see flags or hear God Bless the U.S.A. and instead of being reflexively supportive, I stop and wonder what someone is trying to sell me. Be that as it may, I’m happy enough with the country to still give my 6 year old the cartoon version when I’m explaining the broad outlines of history. We’ll get to the warts later, but I want him to have a generally positive impression of the enterprise.

And, let’s face it, the 4th is a great holiday. Family, fireworks, grills, alcohol, warm weather. That’s living! Happy 4th of July everyone!

Just because I’m sure I’ve probably posted references to polls conducted on behalf of Daily Kos by Research 2000, I think it’s appropriate to note that Kos is reporting that those poll numbers may have been fabricated to one extent or another.

Here is the report from statistics experts suggesting that Research 2000 data probably did not come from random polls. Here is a news report on Daily Kos’ intent to sue Research 2000.

Says Kos:

“While the investigation didn’t look at all of Research 2000 polling conducted for us,” Moulitsas wrote, “fact is I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else.”

“I hereby renounce any post we’ve written based exclusively on Research 2000 polling.”

Everybody’s Favorite Economist (tm), Larry DeBoer, has a good post at Capital Comments about the nation’s budget deficits, the national debt, and the likely consequences of austerity measures during a recession.

Big future deficits are a problem. Big deficits now, not so much. They’re the result of the recession. Tax revenues are way down because of all that unemployment. Spending is up, partly because of added entitlement payments, and partly because of the government’s stimulus spending. But deficits during a recession help. The extra spending and reduced taxes increase the sales of goods and services, which give businesses a reason to employ more people. Without the deficits, unemployment would be even higher.

With unemployment near 10 percent it wouldn’t do to try to reduce the deficit now. The federal government tried that during 1937-38. With the unemployment rate still at 14 percent, the Roosevelt administration cut spending, and Social Security taxes were first collected. The deficit was reduced to near zero – and the economy dropped into recession. Unemployment rose to 19 percent.

We do need a long-range plan to reduce deficits to less than 3 percent of GDP. We need to balance the budget eventually. But not now.

Many others have linked to this piece by Andrew Bacevich in the Washington Post, but it’s worth a read. He suggests that Gen. McChrystal’s contempt for the civilian authority is the natural result of a long war in which the citizenry is detached from the war effort.

Either you keep your wars short or you fully engage the populace in the war effort. You can’t keep your military engaged endlessly while the citizenry goes about its business. The alienated military will grow contemptuous of the rest of the population.

Gary Welsh has a good post commenting on Angela Mapes Turner’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette investigation into Rep. Eric Turner’s (R-Marion) financial interest in the failed ACS/IBM welfare eligibility privatization debacle.

A state representative who fought hard for a controversial call center created in his district as a part of Indiana’s failed welfare privatization effort has a financial stake in the building that houses it.

Rep. P. Eric Turner, R-Cicero, says his investment in the building owned by his son is a non-issue. But critics say the link should have been disclosed during the many public debates about problems with the IBM-led welfare changes.

Just as an added bonus, Turner’s daughter is general counsel for the Family & Social Services Agency and is its legislative director.

As Gary says, “I’m not surprised by Turner’s obvious self-dealing, and I doubt many others who’ve watched him over at the State House over the years are either.” He also notes some other crony type aspects that tie the ACS deals to the Daniels administration. And that’s a huge problem with privatization schemes. So often they seem not to be any real working of the free market. Rather they tend to be a way of shifting money from lower level public employees to executives and shareholders of well-connected businesses while diminishing the potential for public oversight of the operation.

The Journal & Courier has an editorial that is understandable, but, I think, a little wishy-washy. It concludes:

So the task before Congress and the president is to find revenue that can be diverted to job creation or devise incentives to entice businesses to hire more workers.

Driving taxpayers deeper in debt, however, should be avoided, given the nation’s current financial commitments.

I’ll pretend to be a historian and sociologist for a moment. The received wisdom is that World War II got us out of the Great Depression. I think it did so because the existential threat of the Nazis and the Empire of Japan allowed us to forget our misgivings about deficit spending and let the government spend itself silly. After all, nobody ever wonders whether the good folks of Nanking stiffed their creditors after the Imperial Japanese Army came rolling through.

And, it’s not as if all of our spending during the World War II period was targeted at creating jobs. We were quite literally taking our investment of labor and money, turned into bombs and ammunition, and setting it on fire. But, the war got things moving again. The trick – and it is a trick – is that when the war stopped, we were able to stop spending as much. I think we need to spend in a way that puts as many people to work as possible and puts money in as many pockets as possible (e.g., writing a gazillion dollar check to a couple of bankers isn’t going to trickle down and do much good).

The editorial doesn’t offer any meaningful suggestions as to which government programs are supposed to be cut or reduced in favor of “job creation” spending such that enough money goes in a direction that gets the economy humming. I think this approach would probably fall under the heading “too little, too late.”

Happy Father’s Day everyone. In my life, I’m at a pretty cool time to be a Dad. My kids are old enough to be their own little people but still young enough to think I’m pretty cool. They thought a good Father’s Day rule is that they should give Dad lots of hugs and kisses. I thought that was a pretty good rule too.

Our plans today haven’t been terribly ambitious. I got up last (7:30 – not terribly late). I had some coffee and tooled around on the computer a little. The kids gave me some pictures they drew for me. Amy had already done all the necessary dog stuff, but I went ahead and took Brooksey for a little walk – getting to know our new neighborhood a little. When I got back, bacon, eggs, and pancakes were ready for breakfast. After breakfast, the kids & I went to one of the local parks and played a little bit.

This afternoon, my buddy flew his plane up for a short visit, lunch at “Five Guys,” and to see the new house. We hung out with Amy by the pool while the kids swam. Now Harper & I are beating the heat watching Phineas & Ferb in the basement. Cole is playing computer games, and Amy is napping.

All-in-all, I find this Dad thing really agrees with me. No real telling until after the kids are grown whether I’m all that good at it or not, but so far, so good. I’m certainly not the first to suggest it, but I think there is something very valuable about a two parent family. Obviously, it’s just not possible in some situations, but there seem to be a lot of ways in which one parent complements and supplements the other. Certainly that is the case with Amy & I. So often, when one of us is at the end of their rope, the other one is fresh and can kind of sub in. And different parents have different strengths. For example, Amy is organized and motivated. I guess I’d describe myself as laid back and adaptable.

Being a Dad can be challenging, to be sure, but it’s also a lot more rewarding than I’d really anticipated when I got into it.

Anyway, Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads out there. Kick back, fire up the grill, and enjoy your families.

From time to time, I dredge up a notion I’ve been intrigued with since a professor at IU mentioned it in class back in ’96 which is that the Internet and related technologies are turning the world into a large version of the Panopticon. The basic notion of the Panopticon was to design a prison architecturally so that the inmates knew that they could be observed at any time but never knew exactly when they were being watched. This would force them to assume that they were being watched at any given time and modify their behavior accordingly.

The Journal & Courier has an opinion piece that’s relevant to that theme, concerning the placement of security cameras at three local parks. The opinion suggests that these might just create the illusion of security without improving it:

But feeling safe and being safe are two different things.

A story published July 9, 2007, at abcnews.com indicates that surveillance cameras are useful in solving crimes, but cameras have little impact on preventing crime.

. . .

ABC news reported that a British study on the effectiveness of surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom indicated that, at best, surveillance cameras had a negligible effect on deterring crime.

. . .

If there are problems at city parks, those who live in the areas might be better served by organizing neighborhood crime watches and working with police to report suspicious behavior.

I didn’t see the original study, but I wonder if it controls for how prominently the cameras are displayed. I can definitely see where small, unnoticeable cameras would have no effect on crime; but I’d think more obvious cameras would deter crime. Whether that deterrence is worth the loss of privacy is certainly a valid argument. Long-term, however, I suspect we’ll find that “privacy” was a bit of an anomaly in human history. We didn’t have any privacy in the village, and I don’t know that we’ll have any in an increasingly wired future, heavily populated with cameras.

“Only the truly powerless can be truly innocent,” is one of the many things I picked up from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In that sense, the Libertarians are probably innocent when it comes to fall out from the BP spill. When pressed, I think I have to concede that the problems in the Gulf are not the result of libertarian policy and certainly not of Libertarian politicians. However, there may be some second hand blame to pass around because of the frequency with which non-libertarian policies are dressed up with a fig leaf of libertarianism. Crony capitalism and lax oversight are often justified with vague mutterings about the invisible hand and letting the free market work.

But, among other things, as Mike Kole pointed out (in a Facebook posting), the cap on oil company liability which enjoyed bipartisan support wasn’t a libertarian move. That prompted a response from me that I thought I’d re-hash here instead of providing any original content. But first, I ought to note that Libertarians get more criticism for me because, fairly or not, I hold them to a higher standard. I don’t really expect any consistency out of Republicans or Democrats. They exist primarily for the purpose of getting elected; such principles as they have are mostly incidental to that larger goal. With Libertarians, the principles are primary and getting elected is secondary.

Anyway from my response to Mike’s Facebook thread:

I think this situation [the BP oil spill] does implicate what I regard as some weaker spots in libertarian thought. I don’t think libertarian philosophy deals well with pollution. Generally, there is a proposition that folks should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn’t injure the property or persons of others. That’s fine as far as it goes, but too often the injury from pollution is subtle, difficult to trace, and difficult to quantify; allowing its cost to be externalized onto others.

Another problem is that people frequently have the ability to cause more damage than they can pay for. I’m not sure there is any real help in this situation from libertarian thought — the victim just has to bear the loss when the culprit is tapped out. This problem can be particularly bad when the culprit is a corporation which shields individuals from personal responsibility and which have a disturbing habit of dissolving when times are tough. I understand that there is a division among libertarians as to the propriety of the corporate form. As a practical concession, I can see why Libertarians would accept corporations as a reality they have to live with. But, in terms of pure philosophy, I don’t think the corporate form has any legitimate function in a libertarian world-view, existing as it does to shield individuals from the consequences of their actions.

The invisible hand can’t and won’t clean up this mess. We need to look at why the free market might break down at this level and recognize those potential weaknesses when designing policy in the future.

Amanda Hamon, writing for the Journal & Courier, has an article about the ceremonial completion of one of those projects that a city needs to undertake even though it’s probably not going to get voters fired up. It’s an underground sewer tunnel in downtown Lafayette, and if it’s working right, nobody is going to notice it’s there.

The 2,300-foot-long tunnel, which runs along Second Street, has been accepting flow since April 10, said Brad Talley, the city’s wastewater superintendent.

“It’s working well,” he said. “With the rains we’ve had so far, it’s reduced the amount of overflows going into the river by 38 million gallons already, in two months or so.”

. . .

The $18.9 million project is part of the city’s 20-year, long-term control plan to eliminate sewage overflows caused by the city’s antiquated combined sewer system that mixes stormwater with raw sewage.

Talley said the tunnel will eliminate 30 percent of the city’s annual volume of sewage overflows into the Wabash River. The tunnel has the capacity to store up to 1.5 million gallons of water, he said.

This kind of thing is at the heart of why we need government. Cities have a ton of people all packed together. That comes with consequences. We aren’t islands unto ourselves. So, for example, you have to build sewage tunnels that help deal with our waste without dumping it into the river for those downstream to enjoy. It requires a fair number of tax dollars and, when folks are complaining about taxes, it would rarely occur to them to chalk a sewage tunnel up on the “benefits” side of the ledger.