A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

On the way into work today, I heard an NPR piece by Lynn Neary that The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was published 75 years ago today. I read Grapes of Wrath relatively close in time to when I read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. If those books don’t make you skeptical about the way the free market values labor, probably nothing will.

Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…

Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.

Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

I enjoyed this Kathleen Parker column on Stephen Colbert taking over for David Letterman. Probably I liked that she said that “heartlanders” have the best sense of humor. When I hear “heartland,” I think “Midwest.” Colbert is from South Carolina, so Parker calls “heartlanders” those who are “devoted to family and devout of spirit.” So, that’s kind of weird. Aside from geography, I guess my sense of “heartlanders” has to do (at least in the context of personality and humor) with a self-deprecating modesty that stems from a perspective of one’s place in the world. An awareness of one’s relationship to others and theirs to you is a fertile source of humor. Colbert clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously, nor is he overawed by those who have an overblown sense of their own importance. In that, I think he’ll be an excellent successor to David Letterman.

In years past, I’ve mentioned the fine work done by others in bringing attention to conflicts of interest by state representative Eric Turner. I read about Rep. Turner’s profiting from his son’s leasing of space to ACS during the welfare privatization debacle via Advance Indiana and Angela Mapes Turner and his 2011 problems with nursing home legislation where he was invested in his son’s nursing home related business via Leo Morris and Heather Gillers.

Today, it’s the Indiana Law Blog where I first saw a link to Tom LoBianco’s article about how nursing home legislation would have cost Rep. Turner and his family. This incident from the 2014 session seems very reminiscent of the 2011 situation.

A top Indiana lawmaker, his family and investors in their company risked losing millions in future profits if a proposed ban on construction of new nursing homes in Indiana had become law this year, an Associated Press review has found.

Instead, the bill died after intense private lobbying by House Speaker Pro Tem Eric Turner, R-Cicero, who now faces scrutiny over his actions on legislation that would have directly affected his family.

Public and private financial documents show Turner and other direct investors in Mainstreet Property Group rely on building new nursing homes to make money, generating returns of up to 600 percent in some cases.

The ethics rules for the General Assembly are fairly weak. Even so, Rep. Turner has a reputation for playing closer to the line than most. (And, to be clear, plenty of lawmakers don’t seem to get anywhere near the line.) I don’t expect much to come out of the General Assembly’s own ethics investigation into Turner’s activity; but, I’d suggest that it’s in the General Assembly’s best interest to make it clear whether Rep. Turner’s actions are more of the exception or more of the rule.

Because I’m sure he’ll appreciate whatever minimal traffic I can send him, I’ll comment on a blog post by Abdul suggesting that we use the free market to raise the minimum wage. In particular, he suggests that, if as a matter of policy, our individual preference is to see workers paid better, we should direct our business to those organizations that pay their employees well.

This is a fine idea, but not sufficient to address what amounts to a structural imbalance. Commercial efforts generate a certain amount of additional value. That additional value, the profit, gets split up among the people who produced the value — investors, management, and labor usually. The way the profit gets divided up is not necessarily in proportion to the value of the contributions of each party. Rather, it has to do with the bargaining power of the respective contributors as well.

The problem labor has in getting its share of the profit pie tends to be lack of organization and lack of leverage. An individual laborer lacks bargaining power because an individual laborer is usually easily replaceable. In addition, the individual laborer often has to have whatever he or she can get as a matter of necessity — to acquire or maintain food, shelter, and clothing. That necessity has a coercive effect on their bargaining position. It’s not quite a gun to the head, but it makes it much more difficult for the laborer to walk away from the table than it is for management or the investor who is much more likely to have his or her necessities squared away.

So, I think the minimum wage debate ends up being a decision. The policy decision is that, by fiat, we require a certain minimum to ensure that labor gets at least a certain baseline portion of the profit. The alternative, I suppose, would be to go a more socialist direction where more of life’s necessities were guaranteed whether a person worked or not. At that point, the negotiation between labor, management, and investors would be more of an arm’s length transaction and the price point of the wages would more accurately reflect the value of the labor.

I’m not necessarily advocating the more socialist approach. Culturally, we have a deep opposition to policies that condone idleness — our Puritan work ethic perhaps. But, I think that’s the policy alternative to the minimum wage if we want the free market to receive accurate signals about proper labor prices.

Two stories on littering caught my eye.

Robin Gibson, writing for the Muncie Star Press, has a story about littering in Muncie and an organization that helps clean it up. The AP has a story that appears in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette about junk that’s been in a ravine since 1957.

Generally, littering speaks of laziness and a pretty significant sense of entitlement. Rather than taking the usually minimal effort of getting trash to some appropriate spot, the person is going to inflict their trash on the rest of the world. My anecdotal experience is that smokers are often the most frequent offenders. For some reason, many of them think nothing of flicking their filters on the ground as if, for some reason, they don’t “count” as litter.

I had not seen the news about Gov. Pence taking the talking point about the supposed scientific consensus in the 70s about “global cooling” or a new ice age. This is a bit of handwaving intended to discredit the current scientific consensus about human caused climate change. Silly eggheads are always changing their minds. Aren’t they silly?

In this story about our IDEM official conflating “local weather” with “climate,” the AP states:

In February, Gov. Mike Pence said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wasn’t sure climate change was caused by human activities.

“We haven’t seen a lot of warming lately,” Pence said.

“I remember back in the ’70s, we were talking about the emerging ice age,” he said. “We’ll leave the scientific debate to the future.”

Who can say whether that light coming at us down the tunnel is a body smashing freight train or not? We’ll leave that debate to the people who write our obituaries.

In any event, someone who actually cared about the realities of scientific thought in the 70s went back and took a look at what scientists were actually saying back then:

Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”

As for the IDEM guy who took our unusually cold weather as an opportunity to suggest that it disproves the idea of global warming, turns out that “Indiana” is not “the earth.”

Baugues wrote to his staff on March 19 in response to their outcry. But he stuck by his position, calling himself “a skeptic on global warming.”

“It seems silly to be talking about global warming at a time when we were having extremely cold unseasonable weather,” he wrote.

Although January was indeed unusually cold across much of the United States, it was actually the fourth-warmest January on record worldwide, according to Lonnie G. Thompson, an Ohio State University professor of earth sciences.

Updated: The original post was from April 6, 2014 – I’m updating this on May 15, 2017, to add a link to this 2013 column debunking the “ice age scare of the 1970s” myth and a link to this story about Trump’s staff giving him a fake Time cover hoax as real news about the 70s ice age myth.

Keith Roysdon, writing for the Muncie Star Press, reports that the long struggling Cedarbridge Juvenile Facility has closed.

Cedarbridge Treatment Centers — which recently told other Indiana county court systems it would be relocating and moving their juveniles — closed on Thursday. Employees told The Star Press on Tuesday that representatives from Cedarbridge’s corporate office in Indianapolis loaded the last 19 or so juvenile inmates into vans on Thursday and took them away, presumably to a facility in Ladoga in West Central Indiana.
. . .
In early 2013, the Indiana Department of Correction reported on inspections of the facility by noting, “Cedarbridge Treatment Center has not demonstrated an ability to ensure long-term compliance with the Indiana juvenile detention standards or an ability to improve and maintain the quality of confinement for youth entrusted to their care.”

I just read a joke in an alumni magazine Miami sent to my house, presumably in hopes that I would supplement my tuition with additional contributions to that institution.

“Politics. Remember the word. It came to us from the Greeks. Poli, meaning many, and tics, meaning blood sucking insects.”

It’s a hackey joke, but more than that, it speaks of an alienation from the political process. Government isn’t “them.” Or at least it shouldn’t be. Government is “us” — it’s a tool we use to accomplish our goals. Allowing government to be “them” seems like an abdication of civic responsibility.

I get the temptation. It’s emotionally satisfying to be a victim of “them,” to only include in “us” people who are alike. If you are separate, then you can remain pure without working very hard at it.

This is as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else who happens to read this.

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.