(Let me take a paragraph here for obligatory grovelling: Oh, thank you, your Majesty. Your Graciousness, Your Holiness. Thank you for allowing your subjects to engage in voluntary exchanges without the fear of fine or imprisonment)

Anyway, I hail a cab and he says it’s gonna cost me $45 to get home. (It’s usually about $15). On top of that, I have to share the cab with two other folks who also have to pay another $45.

I happily take the offer.

Now, why wasn’t I outraged? Why didn’t I rampage against this taxi driver’s clear use of extortion through price gouging?

Demand. That’s why. Without this incentive to make some extra money by risking his car in the snow, that taxi driver would have stayed home for the day with his family. I was grateful that he could charge me whatever he wanted. Without the open market,  no one would have any reason to drive anyone anywhere on a day like this.

Of course, next week the taxi drivers will be back on the meter system. We’ll return to a system controlled by an elected planning board, one that offers no incentive to upgrade the product or offer better services. It’s a shame.

Furthermore, if you ever want to make friends with a cabbie in DC, ask him about the new meter system, and sympathize with him when he tells you it’s ruining his ability to make a living. It’s amazing how easy it is to make economic libertarians out of people when it’s  labor and services they’re after.

One of the cars pelted was driven by a plainclothes police officer identified only as Det. Baylor. Baylor got out of his car and brandished his gun at the crowd.

Reason.tv’s Dan Hayes was on the scene, capturing the tense confrontation between police and citizens who chanted “Don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight!”

Approximately 5 minutes; harsh language throughout.

-Jerry Taylor

As as I said in the title of this post, nice try, but no. An outsider to U.S. politics might wonder how a clause like that has remained in a state Constitution for more than 100 years. Well, it’s simply a product of federalism and the way our court system works. A state can attempt just about anything and it will stay on the books until it is individually challenged. Typically, matters that involve severe injustices are removed quickly. But others somehow hold on, and can wait decades to be challenged.

It’s a blatantly unconstitutional provision, and now that it has been brought to light, it will be removed. As Ed Morrissey points out, “the Supreme Court has already overturned Maryland’s constitutional bar for public office on religious affiliation in 1961 andNorth Carolina will lose this one, too.”

So thank you, political opponent. You’ve finally brought the North Carolina State Constitution into the post-Enlightenment 19th century. I applaud you.

WASHINGTON (AP) – A House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion, over the objections of some lawmakers who said Congress has meatier targets to tackle.

The bill, which faces steep odds, would ban the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision game as a national championship unless it results from a playoff.

Critics are saying that in a time like this, when the government has bigger things on its hands, it shouldn’t spend time on something like college football. Those people are wrong, or at least, only half right. Elected members of the Congress should never be throwing their weight around on a matter like this, no matter how much time they have on their hands. I don’t care how rotten the current system is. This is not a matter of national concern or public policy.

With his swimming trunks packed for a leisurely Sunday at the pool, 19-year-old Seaman 1st Class William Benny was finishing his breakfast when the first Japanese bomb fell from the sky.

“The first thing we heard was a loud explosion and everybody ran to the casement to look out to see where the explosion hit,” said Benny, who served on the USS Nevada.

Benny and another Port St. Lucie veteran, Roy Miller, vividly remember Dec. 7, 1941, the “date which will live in infamy,” 66 years after the planes flew over their heads and bombs landed on the nation’s ships at Pearl Harbor.

As Benny climbed a ladder to man his station, a bomb struck the ship, blasting shrapnel straight at him.

“I got hit with something and fell to the deck,” said Benny, 85. “But I got back up.”

That “something” turned out to be six pieces of shrapnel that lodged in his body.

In the end, six bombs struck the ship before it came to a rest in the shallow water. Fifty of Benny’s shipmates on the USS Nevada were killed that morning.

“When I came down, they had the dead lined up on the deck by then,” he said.

“I’d never seen a dead person in my life, not even a funeral, so it was very devastating.”

Benny wasn’t the only one taking the morning off.

Across the water, another sailor was just taking off his shirt for some sunbathing on the deck of the USS St. Louis, when the first wave of Japanese planes roared into the harbor.

Seaman Gunner Mate 1st Class Roy Miller threw his clothes back on, took one last look at the incoming attack and manned his battle station below deck, where he could not see what occurred above.

He worked the entire day alone, loading ammunition into the ship’s blazing guns.

“I did the work of three guys,” said Miller, 87.

Benny and Miller are two of nearly 4,800 survivors in the United States, according to the Pearl Harbor Survivor Association.

I challenge you to investigate poor neighborhoods in places like San Francisco, in the Chinatown districts (GPA of these districts) v. Oakland GPAs for examples to see if the emphasis (de-emphasis) in the home by parents and families has any bearing on whether a child advances or not,  as opposed to the impacts of  government funding (or the absense thereof).

Since LBJ’s great society, we’ve thrown billions away trying to advance the education of below poverty children of all races and ethnicities. If there is a marked difference between Oriental children in poverty vs blacks in poverty, being that the same government dollars were dispensed, what was the difference? I may be wrong, but I contend that the emphasis in the home on education is the difference, not the amount of money dispensed or resources produced by government. Of course both need the opportunity to advance, but I suspect that the problem isn’t money coming from the outside, but the values instilled from the inside.

The values at home matter immensely. Upbringing and home values are some of the most important factors in a person’s ability to engage with the world because it has a defining impact on how that person sees the world around him.

But what I’m focusing on is purely public policy. Strictly, “given this reality, what is an effective and prudent government response?” It might be tempting, given the social reality that you described, to move toward an increased role of government to support these family values. But I would not advocate for programs to be put in place to promote those values; this is not the proper role and function of government.

Yes, encouraging parents to inspire their children to succeed is a noble goal, but not all good and noble ideas need to be taken up by the government. I fear that the same type of waste under  LBJ’s Great Society would occur again. It’s okay to throw away billions, so long as we had good intentions, right? (Wrong).

For starters, take a look at  the rate of federal education spending vs. achievement:

I do not advocate for investing more public money through the failed bureaucratic and monopolistic education model we have today. That has already proven to be a failure. Whoever thought a one-size-fits-all education system would work for all American children has never spent any time with children. What might work for one family or child won’t necessarily work for another. Which is why our system hasn’t worked: There is little, if no room for flexibility. Public education is, for families who cannot afford private schooling, based on a monopoly model. Billions of dollars are spent to educate children, but the rate of achievement remains stagnant. Which is why the barriers to educational competition ought to be torn down, families should be free to spend education dollars on institutions that are best suited to their children, and the system should be opened up to allow those institutions to be built.

Until the system is reformed from an institutional level,  nothing will change, no matter how much money is spent.

One study in Seattle revealed that despite the fact that drug enforcement officers retrieve far more illicit substances when focusing on drug transactions captured by a private property search warrant, drug officers  insist on focusing their efforts on open air drug markets.

To wit:

During the period under investigation, buy-bust operations, which targeted ‘street dealers,’ yielded an average of .1 gram of narcotics and 33 cents in funds seized per officer-hour spent conducting the operation. By contrast, search-warrant arrests, which by definition occur indoors, yielded an average of 52 grams of illegal drugs and $749 per officer.

Despite this, resources are still heavily devoted to busting the outdoor transactions, which leads to more minority arrests, but less yield. This leaves it very hard to say with any honesty that racial disparity is just an “unfortunate byproduct” of the drug war.

Ninety-nine percent of children who are Black, who live in a single parent household, and who live with a head of household who has less than 12 years of education have experienced poverty, compared with only 15% of children who are White, who live in two-parent households, and who live with a head of household who has completed at least 12 years of education.

-Karen Seccombe, Families in Poverty in the 1990s,: Trends, Causes, Consequences and Lessons Learned

Seecombe’s description applies to a majority of black children in urban areas in the United States. As a policymaker, this is where you are starting from when crafting laws. This is a harsh reality, but a reality nonetheless, and must be taken into account  The gap cannot be ignored, and must be factored in when framing policy discussions.