The best time to plant an oak tree was twenty-five years ago.
The second best time is today.
James Carville
Munro, Boudreaux and Obama's Immigration Fiat
In my epic rant in yesterday's post about Obama's unconstitutional abuse of executive power in unilaterally imposing his own version of the DREAM Act by executive fiat, I had seen in passing on Drudge Report, the kerfuffle on Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro's oddball interruption of Obama's speech with an eyebrow-raising question, "Why do you favor foreigners over American workers?" Where the heck did that come from? EXPLETIVE DELETED! And then I hear Tucker Carlson, a contemporary media conservative icon, try to defend it.
I understand that Carlson, as the Daily Caller editor, has a vested interest in the Daily Caller, but really: here we have one of the most troubling Presidential decisions and speeches in years from a constitutional standpoint, we have had one of the most blatant flip-flops in American history where the Administration has been on the record several times saying it couldn't do what it just did, and the best that the Daily Caller can do is present a reporter asking a loaded question, the unprofessional journalistic equivalent of "Did you kill your mother with an ax?" that wasn't even germane to the core issues. I'm not even getting to the petty nonsense of whether Neil Munro just had the journalistic equivalent of a Joe Wilson moment, whether he had heckled or interrupted the President's speech.
Let us have a reality check here: Obama was talking about providing older foreign-born dependents whom have been living in this country a form of legal work permit. (I bet you dollars to doughnuts that the unions aren't happy with that; keep in mind one of the stumbling blocks to 2007 immigration reform is that the unions vociferously objected to any kind of temporary work visa program, one of the key demands of GOP Senate immigration sponsors.) Let me make a wild guess: unauthorized older dependents are probably finding work the same way their parents have been. Go figure... (As a classical (free market) liberal, I want to bring the underground economy out into the open.)
But even more troubling to Tucker Carlson should be Neil Munro's outdated perspective on immigration statistics. One of the side benefits to the Democratic failure in mismanaging the US economy in the wake of the economic tsunami has been reverse migration (for a variety of reasons: falling birth rates in Mexico, an improving Mexican economy, poor job prospects in the US, etc.) I have quoted several in the past; here's yet another:
Roughly 6.1 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants were living in the U.S. last year, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Center study released Monday. It was the biggest sustained drop in modern history, believed to be surpassed in scale only by losses in the Mexican-born U.S. population during the Great Depression.One of my favorite economists, Don Boudreaux, understandably went on the offensive against Munro with a letter to the WSJ. Jobs are not widgets; labor is a factor in the generation of wealth. As production becomes ever more efficient, fewer workers are needed, widgets become cheaper, and consumers spend their resources (eventually) on other goods and services. The economy has grown to the point that despite record harvests, only 2 or 3 per hundred workers make their living farming--versus a largely agricultural economy at the country's birth. Boudreaux is quite correct, of course, but Munro went past predictable labor union protectionism almost to the point of xenophobia: and applied it to young residents whom have been attending American schools and have been members of American communities for much of their lives; they are de facto Americans.
The issue I have with Dr. Boudreaux's letter is that it's overkill and the reporter's question was inappropriate; I also dislike having the immigration debate being solely characterized in terms of low-skill Latin American migration to the US. We have obsolete quota systems, we have a chained immigration system that values family connections over merit-based criteria--and Boudreaux should be pointing out, from the standpoint of a free market, that it's been the Democrats under pressure from their labor union supporters that brought an end to the Bracero program by the 1960's and have consistently fought off temporary work visa programs from Latin America. The point I'm trying to make here is that Don Boudreaux is failing to point out that labor protectionism is red meat on both sides of the aisle. I agree that many GOP conservatives are hypocritical when they claim to be free market but are anti-immigration. (And there are other sins against the free market as well--Big Defense, the anti-China nonsense and Bush's steel tariffs, for instance.) I think, though, much of the GOP resistance has more to do with paper-worshiping law-and-order conservatism than labor protectionism (Most of the conservatives I've heard on the issue don't frame the issue like Munro has; Munro's question could have easily come from Obama's labor union supporters.). On the other hand, the Democrats have more consistently protectionist: take the fact that the Democrats had sat on free trade pacts with Panama, Colombia and South Korea for years before fairly recently finally approving them.
I haven't watched Fox News in some time, so I didn't see (until today) Charles Krauthammer's insightful as always commentary, salient and consistent with my rant yesterday.
Rant of the Day
Lee Doren starts off his rant by apparently referencing a news item about Calcutt Middle School in Central Falls, RI: new principal David Alba has implemented a policy mandating graduation of eighth graders into high school provided they pass at least one of their math, science, English and Social Studies classes. It may well be that Alba is simply a tool carrying out the policies of Superintendent Frances Gallo, whom has uncritically suggested that retention (i.e., failing eighth grade and repeating it) contributes to school dropout rates.
I want to go further than Doren does on the point: this constitutes, in my judgment, a breach of professional ethics and yet is another example of why the public school system must be privatized. Let me turn one of the favorite Democrat talking points (I particularly HATE with a passion) on its head: every time you talk about allowing, say, health insurance to be marketed across states, you get the knee-jerk reaction about an alleged "race to the bottom". [No, it's the free market of insurance, instead of captive consumers to state protectionist schemes of letting special interest groups socialize certain nonessential medical costs on the backs of the many.] An obvious core objection is once you impose such a dysfunctional policy, it affects student behaviors; in many cases, you can anticipate suboptimal short-term student strategies, e.g., focusing on passing social studies while giving short shrift to math and science. No, if the citizens of Central Falls, RI want to do something constructive to promote public education, a good start would be the termination of Superintendent Gallo, Principal Alba, and sympathetic educational sophists, worried more about retaining funding of merely filled seats.
The second story Doren is referencing is a scandal involving 10 TSA employees (including a supervisor) at the Philadelphia airport. The TSA requires annual proficiency exams. "After one officer failed the exam twice, according to court papers, [training manager] Gilliam took him outside the testing room and offered to take the test for him in exchange for $200." (Gilliam pled guilty in federal court to one count of bribery.) Three of the employees also identified in the bribery scandal have resigned, and the other 7 have been terminated.
One thing to keep in mind: this is likely only the tip of the iceberg. In a lawsuit-prone country (I and others believe that legal costs are a major inhibitor in growth of the US economy; we seriously need to sanction frivolous lawsuits), one has to be careful of what one alleges. I'm far more observant about details than most people; there were many times I would suspect cheating, but I didn't have sufficient evidence. There were things I used to discourage cheating: I would mimeograph my own exams, and I published different permutations of exam questions.
I have made multiple references to a group of Asian students whom had turned in a graduate systems analysis project. I had already traced about 85% of the project to unattributed original sources and had one more source I knew from context was the "missing link". Sure enough, the UWM library had a copy of the missing link. Surprise, surprise: the student had recently renewed the book. Here's where I ran into a library system which, in its misguided zeal to protect patron confidentiality, was aiding and abetting academic dishonesty. I was facing a deadline to make a charge of academic dishonesty, sort of an academic statute of limitations. Inter-library loan would not get me the volume in time to meet the deadline. Quite often, a faculty member can put a priority recall on a book to force its surrender; the library refused in this case. I asked if the library would confirm that the book was checked out by one of the students in question. Once again, the library refused to cooperate. I had no choice but to go with the 85% I had (which was probably more than enough to convict the students in a court of law) and called the students in. They obviously knew why, and literally within 30 seconds two of the students broke down and confessed, pleading for mercy.
The point is not about demonizing students whom make a mistake: you want them to snap out of it. Sooner or later, it catches up with you. Quite often, I would do the technical interviews to qualify fellow Oracle DBA's for a project (most DBA's don't know how to do decent tech screens: for example, more than a few will ask questions based on some complicated technical issue they've been struggling with). In one particularly suspicious case (a puffed up, professionally written resume from an Indian DBA), I remember putting a little twist on the screen and described in general terms the functional aspects of rollback segments (a basic infrastructure concept) and asked him to identify it. I could literally hear book pages turning in the background: here's a hint for an applicant: once I hear pages turning, we are done. (Of course, Internet searches are quieter, but there are telltale pauses.) He seemed to know it. I'll give him credit: just before the call ended, he asked me for the answer. He told me that he wouldn't be able to get to sleep that night not knowing.
Another example: I mentioned in the past was serving as an Oracle Apps DBA temp for a Santa Clara-based subsidiary of a Japanese high tech company. This was during the late stages of the Internet bubble in 1999; the client's DBA had given notice, and an agency found me available in Chicago. I was offered a 5-week contract; a new IT manager was named about 3 weeks into the engagement. He decided to extend me a month because an IT colleague was going on a month-long vacation to India; however, in the interim he had also rehired the original DBA. In one of the oddest developments I've ever seen, the same DBA ended up resigning a week later, eventually leading to a full-time offer for me 2 months later; the story behind his abrupt resignation was an even earlier employer had offered him stock options. What I didn't know at the time was how the original DBA had become available for rehire; my sources told me that the consulting company that had hired him discovered that he had been bluffing about having certain Oracle experience and terminated him his second day on the job.
There are obvious implications about airline safety when you know some TSA employees in Philadelphia have cheated. Do you think that there's something distinctive about TSA candidates in Philadelphia? That's highly unlikely. Among other things,we've got to wonder if new TSA staffers have been "socially promoted" from original training onto the job, not unlike the eighth graders discussed above.
Before concluding this commentary, there's been a topic I've been meaning to discuss: the concept of risk. Social liberals have a problem with this discussion. Almost anyone who has ever studied economics and/or has a business degree has encountered what Joseph Juran called the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule, aka the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity ). Pareto, the Italian economist, discovered that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. Similar proportions have been found across a wide variety of phenomenon (50%<=K<=100%, where K tends to cluster around 80%, to 100%-K%*), e.g., 20% of the pea pods in a garden contained 80% of the peas, a past United Nations Development Program Report revealed the richest 20% of the world's population controlling 82.7% of the world's income, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% of the errors and crashes would be eliminated, 20% of the hazards that cause 80% of the injuries or accidents, 20% of customers contribute 80% of the income, 20% of patients have been found to use 80% of health care resources, and 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals.
There are some nuances about specific distributions and additivity (see the above cited source); for instance, there is a certain reflexive nature to the principle. For example, if you look at the top 20% of income/wealth, it has its own Pareto ratio: for example, 4% (20% of 20%) of the population owns 64% (80% of 80%) of the wealth, and so on.
The basic thing I'm trying to get across is that when we look at things like social policy, airport safety, etc., we have to start from the fact that we have a finite amount of public resources (i.e., tax revenue). Remember the kerfuffle over annual breast exams, e.g., for women over a certain age? Exams can result in false positives; treating a woman on a false positive result not only is a waste of medical resources but is unduly tragic for the affected woman.
When it comes to airport security, some law-and-order conservatives feel "whatever it takes". Most of us who have worked with measures know to judge relevant criteria of reliability and validity. For example, we would hope that the TSA proficiency exam would correlate to positive TSA performance (e.g., quicker, accurate detection of suspects and/or their belongings). In fact, let us briefly summarize some past findings on TSA performance (NB: past failures are not indicative of future improvement, especially when we are discussing the government):
Multiple news outlets (including this blog) have cited numbers that suggest that screeners from America's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) detect less than 30% of the knives and guns that officials try to sneak through security in tests. "We've had a series of reports actually going back several years from the inspector general, from the General Accounting Office, and our own TSA Office of Inspection, where they do, as you describe, covert testing," [TSA administrator] Pistole acknowledged to George Stephanopoulos last month during an interview on Good Morning America. "And unfortunately, [undercover testers] have been very successful over the years." [ABC News] referenced "a person briefed" on "the latest tests" who said they have a failure rate of 70%.Now, don't you law-and-order conservatives feel more confident that guys not able to find a knife or gun are more competent when it comes to irrational searches of your private orifices (or young children or elderly patients) or humiliating "accidental spills" of catheters? We have a knee-jerk reactionary system that requires passengers to shed shoes after decades of not having to do so because of an unsuccessful shoe bomber or invasive searchers after an unsuccessful underwear bomber: why couldn't we just train passengers to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior of other passengers (like trying to set their feet on fire)?
We know, from historical evidence, that the vast majority of passengers pose absolutely no threat to airline safety, and the detailed inspection of each passenger is absolutely unnecessary, unduly invasive and hence inefficient--a deadweight loss to the flying public that adds not one ounce of safety to the overall system.
In the world of audits (I have a graduate accounting minor), the nature and extent of an audit depends on sampling results and the accounting system being used. For example, if the accounting system is homegrown, versus, say, a well-maintained major vendor system with few, if any customizations, there are additional risks, which may call for an extended audit. There are vouching and tracing transactions (to ensure proper two-way functionality of the system, from source transactions to final statements). If there are some anomalies in the audit results (say, we can't find source documents for certain transactions), the auditor may expand the audit.
Part of the problem is that when the government interferes in anything (say, "health insurance"), it interferes with risk assessment for political vs. scientific reasons. For example, if, say, women's health services costs more than men's on average, women should pay more for their higher costs (i.e., higher premiums); if women live longer (all other factors being equal: retirement age, contributions, etc.), the salient test of equality is the net present value of the pension cash flows (i.e., women should receive lower monthly benefits). But ideological feminists don't care about the underlying finances: so what if it takes a business longer to dry clean a woman's garment and the dry cleaner pays an employee the same rate: if the business charges a higher price to reflect the higher labor costs, ideological feminists will also incompetently call the pricing "discriminatory". Yes, the same ideological feminists resentful for men holding a door open for them don't have a problem with having them subsidize their healthcare, social security or laundered garments... Don't get me started on the knowingly misleading propaganda about 77 cents on the dollar, which I've discussed and dismissed in an earlier post.
Lee Doren probably wouldn't go as far as I would, but I have a simple solution to the failures in public education and the TSA: privatize them. That "race to the bottom" sound bite that social liberals love to cite? It reflects the deadweight loss to the general public of having government management and employees perform services more efficiently and effectively done by the private sector in the competitive crucible of a vibrant free economy.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "The Waiting"
