Speed Camera Pimping

It looks like people are now taking advantage of this new, guilty until proven innocent folly in order to hurt their rivals. ‘Speed Camera Pimping“, as it is being called (Plate Cloning in Europe) is the act of putting a printout of someone else’s licence plate on your car and then intentionally zipping through red lights in order to rack up tickets. The city has a conflict of interest in this case since it is far easier for them to continue to accept these vast revenues than to solve the problem.

The Most Basic of Economic Principles

If you can solve this brain teaser from a 1932 issue of Modern Mechanics, you may just be a step ahead of your average congressman when it comes to fixing the economy.

Do Superpowers Inevitably Degrade Into Socialism?

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline. –  Milton Friedman

As our government continues to bail out big corporations, a pattern is emerging. The current bailout targets the big auto manufacturers, and just like with the banks, the government is saying that the companies are failing due to poor decisions. This presents the government with a dilemma. If it does nothing, the economy could continue a steep decline. If it bails out the failing companies, it risks the loss of the additional money, and encourages other large corporations to play dead for a handout. In order to avoid the appearance of rewarding and subsidizing failure, the government is attempting to get a share in the companies and regulate their decisions. This presents a host of difficulties.

• With no fear of failure, the company doesn’t feel the hunger to optimize and make a better, more competitive product, they just throw their newfound weight around. 
• Domestic competitors who were not failing now have the problem of a rival who has an artificial advantage. This actually serves to increase monopolistic tendencies. This is illustrated with our bailed out banks taking the opportunity to buy out competitors rather than loan money. 
• As the company attempts to find loopholes to wriggle free of its new bonds, the government counters with additional regulations, thus digging us deeper.

If we follow this to a logical end we see American car companies being given a global competitive advantage by having their cost of doing business artificially reduced. This has the same effect upon foreign competitors as the kind of corporate bullying you see when a Wal-Mart arrives in a small town and drives all of the local businesses under. Foreign governments will then have a choice. They can either let their auto manufacturers die because America played dirty, or they can subsidize their own auto manufacturers. What this could lead to is a new cold war in which we have a race towards socialism in order to conquer the global market.

Ron Paul on Anti-Trust

This is a very old video (07/13/1983) of Dr. Ron Paul (congressman) and Dr. Dominick Armentano (Ph.D. in economics) discussing the role of government in relation to monopoly. It is a commonly held belief in this country that one of the main functions of our government is protecting us from large corporations. As our recent banking bailout illustrates, it generally does the opposite. While I find socialism rather distasteful on a government scale, I tend to think that either socialism or free market are superior to our current system evenly between the two. What we have now is politicians invested in wealthy corporations both protecting them from competition and socializing their losses.

Trial by Jury?

According to the New York Post a Judge has ruled (case is irrelevant) that a jury should be informed of mandatory sentencing.

What is the core purpose of a jury? The concept of a jury seems to have begun in an attempt to remove the appearance of conflict of interest between those in power and the people they preside over. Traditionally a jury is a group of people compelled to render a verdict as to the guilt or innocence of one of their peers. They are not generally allowed to interpret matters of law, since those are handled by the judge. If the judge decides that the jury is ruling contrary to clear evidence in the case, the judge can declare a mistrial and call a new jury. The judge also decides which information the jury will have access to. This has the potential to either preserve the impartiality of the jury or to skew the opinion, depending on what was withheld. The system seems to work, more or less, but it does bring to mind the saying that if voting could really change anything, it would be illegal.

If the job of the jury is simply to decide whether the defendant committed the crime or not, why would they need to know what sentence they could be condemning them to? I see three reasons this should be allowed. For one, if the true purpose of the jury is to see to it that those in power treat their peers fairly, sentencing seems quite relevant. Secondly, if a member of the jury is already familiar with the law, they would already know the answer, so why withhold it from the others? And finally, sentencing is not evidence directly relating to the case, so I see no reason to justify withholding it.

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