Just thought I’d show you a few of the pictures we took.

1. At the Alamo

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(From left: Bryanna, Me, Drew, Ashton (CN Rep) and Tony Montana)

The Collegiate Network was nice enough to take us to dinner tonight. Our new CN rep, Ashton, treated us to delicious burgers and brews during trivia night at the Eugene City Brewery.

Guy Simmons proceeded to order the most expensive things on the menu, abusing our visitor’s generosity while simoultaneously offending the CN rep’s sense of fashion with his kickin’ suit.

We ended up dominating the competition during triva, with “Team Sudsy” coming in at first place. It didn’t do us a damn bit of good though–we only got $2 off our tab. At least we left with our honor.

Blog contest. Dodgeball. Nobel prizes. Trivia.

‘Nuff said.

I went to last night’s Senate meeting, but I had to leave before the they got to to the sweatshop and Russell Athletics resolutions. (Hey, Senate, it would be great if you could spend less than an hour flapping your jaws about every single point on the agenda. Just a thought.) From my extensive Twitter analysis, it appears both of the resolutions failed.

Anyway, Vincent’s post below pretty much nails it, but I’d like to add this 2004 article in Reason, which cites a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

[W]hen economists looked at reams of economic data on wages and workers’ rights in developing countries, they found that multinationals generally paid more — often a lot more — than the wages offered by locally owned companies. The study cites evidence that affiliates of U.S. multinationals “pay a wage premium that ranges from 40 percent in high-income countries to 100 percent, or double the local average wage, in low-income countries.”

Vietnamese workers in foreign-owned apparel and footwear factories rank in the top 20 percent of the population by household expenditure. Indonesian workers in Nike subcontractor factories earned $670 per year, compared to the average minimum wage of $134. In Mexico firms that exported more than 80 percent of their output paid wages that were 58 percent to 67 percent higher than wages paid by domestic firms.

If Russell is truly acting in an illegal and unethical way, then the university should not renew its contract with the company. However, a broad, “anti-sweatshop” resolution would be (a) less effective and (b) naive and somewhat ignorant given the great benefits of foreign direct investment in third-world countries.

Also, Alex “Tomcat” Scott has a good post over on the ODE news blog with many links for and against Russel.

Yesterday the Oregon House of Reps narrowly passed HB 3122, also known as the “honest pint” bill, that would give state-issued stickers to bars that serve true 16-oz pints.

Seems like the state legislature could spend their time doing more important things, but at least you’ll know when you’re getting a honest-to-God pint. Of course, this would be moot if bars would just serve pints in mason jars, the way the good lord intended.

Money quote from a state rep:

“It’s a little past 10:30 here, but it’s 5 o’clock somewhere,” said Rep. Jules Bailey, D-Portland, in opening his pitch.

Dumbass comment award:

Now you won’t get ripped off when you drink until you turn gray, ruin your marriage, lose your job, drive drunk etc. I can think of a number of issues that elected officials could spin their wheels on rather than feeding addiction. What’s next, making sure you don’t get shorted buying meth? Now lets hear from all the alcoholics applauding this nonsense.

Clap, clap clap! Thanks to OC alum Ian Spencer for the tip.

I usually like Matt Petryni’s columns. I don’t always agree with the guy, but he usually seems genuinely thoughtful and I’d put him at the top of the list of this year’s otherwise… lackluster opinion roster over at the Emerald. That said, today’s piece, which attempted to link industrial farming with swine flu (or pandemics in general), was all sound and fury (well, sound at least, and only if you were to read it aloud), signifying… nothing in particular.

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By now, comparisons between Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt have become as commonplace as hearing heedless pundits liken Iraq to Vietnam. Some have gone further, casting Bush as Herbert Hoover while others have gleefully piled on, spouting off about “Hooverites” and “laissez-faire capitalism” whenever they can and without really having any idea what they’re talking about.

Much like the facile equation of Iraq with Vietnam, the substitution of the credit crunch for the Great Depression is based on a few superficial similarities but breaks down under even cursory scrutiny. As with Iraq, however, the cheap comparisons have inspired people to look to past solutions for today’s problems.

Unfortunately, their prescriptions, based as they are on caricatures, have little to do with reality. In no case is this more true than with Franklin Roosevelt’s “first 100 days”, which many hoped Obama’s first 100 days in the Oval Office would be modeled on. In his review of the recently published Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America by Adam Cohen, Daniel Rothschild of the Global Prosperity Initiative ably deconstructs the fashionable inaccuracies regarding Hoover and FDR that have been gaining currency:

Hoover was not the Grinch that Cohen wants him to be; he believed in aid to the poor, preferring it to be raised and delivered through means as close to the recipient as practicable. (This was essentially the same position Roosevelt held as governor of New York.) More important, he was by no means a proponent of unfettered markets. An engineer by training, Hoover believed fully in the power of central planning and technocratic government to better society.

[...]

In a campaign address, he argued that the American economy “is no system of laissez faire” but rather “demands economic justice as well as political and social justice.” Hoover was complex, both as a man and as a president. Cohen’s caricaturization may advance his angel-replaces-devil storyline, but it ignores the similarities between FDR and his predecessor, in both their philosophies and their policies.

For the people who’re pimping the “Obama-as-FDR” meme and getting all spittle-flecked about “Hooverites”, however, the “Great Depression II” narrative is all too easy to cast as the story of hard-nosed and noble progressives struggling to undo the evils of feckless, greedy, and dishonorable conservatives (aided in no small measure by the behavior of the Republican Party over the last eight years). But one should not mistake ill-informed polemics as authentic historiography. Indeed, as Rothschild notes

… Cohen’s actual agenda probably has more to do with influencing the present than understanding the past. The book was timed to appear less than two weeks before Obama’s inauguration, and its jacket carries an alarmist blurb from the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, progenitor of the Eleanor-Rooseveltas-lesbian theory: “At this critical moment, with our nation imperiled by the ‘starve the beast’ crowd, this book offers a hope for what is now again most needed: the restoration of democracy, and the restitution of New Deal agencies to promote dignity and security for all.”

They may yet get their way. After all, fiscal conservatism has been utterly discredited, right?

Welcome to the future.

I’ve been up all night working on a research paper, so I really wasn’t in the right mental state to watch this video posted over at Blue Oregon:

I’ve heard all about the horrible scourge of income disparity, but, frankly, I’ve always wondered what happens after the Great and Just Redistribution of Wealth. Lets just assume, as shown in the video, that that the private wealth of the country is equally divided and every family gets $500,000. What happens next?

Color me crazy, but wouldn’t people just, y’know, get rich and poor again? Or would we continually redistribute wealth to stop any sort of evil income disparity? Would people who make good business decisions or investments have their earnings redistributed to people who blew their $500K on strippers and coke (read: me)? Of course, maybe the presenters in the video are just assuming we’ll be in the midst of the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat by then.

I’m reminded of my days back in a 100-level polisci class when we discussed wealth redistribution. One of my classmates, a staunch Republican, spoke up and said, “If you gave everybody the same amount of money, some people would buy Cheetos … and some people would buy a Cheetos factory.”

Over at Blue Oregon, one of their bloggers has used Bobby Jindal’s speech as a launching pad to explain why “sometimes government is exactly what we need.” To wit:

One of the more ruinous myths within the American story is that private enterprise, the great domain of the individual entrepreneur, is where we find our nation’s greatest innovators, achievers and success stories; government, on the other hand, is composed of scoundrels, carpetbaggers, fools and sycophants. For almost thirty years, we’ve lived with Reagan’s big lie, that “government is the problem.” Yet it was Reagan who grew the national government’s reach and cost to unprecedented size while simultaneously leaving fewer and fewer Americans under that government’s care and protection — or able to pursue the American Dream. And even as quickly as we are seeking to forget Bush, let us understand that he outdid Reagan’s lies, growth of government, and abandonment of citizens by huge margins.  And let us remember as well that he, like the Gipper, was a conservative, no matter how vociferously conservatives seek to deny him.

Oh, so Bush is conservative because you decide he is. How convenient. Well, I might as well point out this new study by George Mason University economist Daniel Klein and graduate student Jason Briggeman which finds that “conservative” magazines (y’know, the kind that defend Bush and his policies) don’t actually support liberty and limited government. From Reason:

On issues related to drugs, gambling, and sex, Klein and Briggeman find, these magazines have been more likely to support the status quo or increased restrictions on freedom than to advocate liberalization. The one partial exception has been National Review, especially in the area of drug policy, where pro-liberalization articles outnumbered those favoring current policy or calling for greater government intervention by a ratio of more than 2 to 1 from 1955 through 2007. But by and large, say Klein and Briggeman, the leading conservative magazines are not “real champions of liberty” because they “more often than not fail to oppose government intrusion into America’s bedrooms, gambling places, and drug activities.”

So yep. Still scoundrels and carpetbaggers as far as I’m concerned.

The state of Oregon is going to ban the sale of novelty lighters. That’s right, no more lighters shaped like genitalia, pistols or nekkid ladies.

And my friends ask me how I can be so completely anti-government. Sheesh.

A few months ago, we covered the predictable cheerleading by progressive types over the then-impending minimum wage hike. Well, the raise in the minimum wage has come and gone and the Eugene Weekly is reporting that things are basically working out the way anyone who wasn’t political invested in pointless exercises in populism assumed they would:

When minimum wage rose 45 cents at the beginning of this year, Jerry James knew that while the increase wouldn’t allow his family to get ahead, it would at least give them a leg up with rising costs.

“It’s good,” James said. “But with the cost of food, it sort of weighs itself out.”

[...]

The 2009 wage increase will allow full-time minimum wage workers to increase their annual income from $16,536 to $17,472, an extra $936 a year. Still, the extra $3.60 a day might not be enough to keep up with the rising cost of food. [emphasis added]

In other words, the price for consumer goods has risen right along with the increase in the state-mandated minimum wage. Who could’ve predicted that?

Anyone?

Bueller?

National Review has a short article by Kevin D. Williamson in this week’s issue about the sad state of occupational-licensing laws; as an example, it uses the case of Adam Sweet, a PSU student whose moving company was shut down by the state because he didn’t have a “Oregon Intrastate Certificate to Transport Household Goods or Passengers.” I wrote about Sweet’s case here and more recently here.

Sorry, the NR article is behind a subscription wall, so I can’t link to it, but I do have a handy-dandy print copy. Here’s some of the text:

Adam Sweet is an Oregon college student who organized some friends into a moving business with a specialty in medical clinics. Alan Merrifield is a Californian who ran a pest-control business free of chemicals and poisons. Both were shut down by occupational-licensing laws that largely serve to protect entrenched business interests while doing little or nothing to protect the public.

Licensure laws make it difficult to start a business or pursue one part time. If you turn a buck from your knack for planting rosebushes or arranging their flowers, you could find yourself fined and jailed for practicing unlicensed landscape architecture or outlaw floristry. [...]

In the cases of Sweet and Merrifield, challenges from the Pacific Legal Foundation forced authorities to admit what everybody knows: These laws exist mostly to protect politically connected businesses.

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I reported last June on the ridiculous case of Adam Sweet, a PSU student who started a moving company only to be shut down by the state because he did not have a “Oregon Intrastate Certificate to Transport Household Goods or Passengers.” (How’s that for bureaucrat-speak?)

Sweet was more outraged when he found out that the state notifies all other moving companies of new license applications, which are denied if any of the companies object. As I noted at the time, this is a shining example of a cartel. Sweet, with assistance from the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the Oregon Attorney General, claiming the state had violated his 14th Amendment rights by providing “an unequal and unconstitutionally protectionist advantage to established moving companies who are able to limit their own prospective competition.”

Well, some good news: On Jan. 21 a federal judge blocked the state’s attempt to throw Sweet’s case out of court. There was also a rally of other small moving companies at the state capitol, and, if Internet comments are to be believed, Oregon Senator Rick Metsger has came out strongly against the moving cartel. From the Oregon Catalyst comment thread on the subject:

I am happy to report that I saw the story when it hit the paper a few months ago and was appalled that state law could allow competitors to decide who can get a moving license. I wrote a bill for my senate transportation committee to eliminate that injustice and will be moving that out of committee and onto the senate floor later this month. Thanks for keeping attention on the issue.

Earlier this week Marcelino de Jesus Martinez proved to the world that he is not only a poor father but also one of the worst negotiators of all time. Martinez reportedly sold his fourteen year old daughter to eighteen year old Margarito de Jesus Galindo with the intent of the two marrying.

What is the going rate for a fourteen year old girl today you may ask? Well, Galindo paid $16k and “provided [Martinez] with 160 cases of beer, 100 cases of soda, 50 cases of Gatorade, two cases of wine, and six cases of meat.” I f you ask me Galindo really came out ahead in this deal. Hell, $16k would only get you a few hours with one of Eliot Spitzer’s girls and this guy is giving his daughter away forever. And as for the rest of the food and beverages I think he should have asked for much much more. If I were him I would have asked for at least 200 maybe 250 cases of beer. And I would have made it something good, like PBR.

I came across this today.

Let it soak in a moment…

Okay, so we have Larry Flynt and the Girls Gone Wild guy (who I could have sworn was in jail for tax evasion or something along those lines) asking the government for a $5 billion bailout. Their DVD sales have slipped, but their website growth has actually increased in the past year.

And their reasoning for this is not that they need money but rather:

[T]he industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

I am as pro-porn as the next pro-porn person, but this is just god-damn ridiculous. What I’d like to see is exactly what Flynt’s plan is for rejuvenating the sex lives of Americans. Personally, I’m doing alright, but still …

I guess we’ll see how broken the government is depending on what they do with Flynt’s request (ignore it, I imagine).

A final note, the quotes from that article are the most amazingly vague quotes I’ve seen in some time, and we just had an election.

Over at Reason, Catherine Mangu-Ward has a long piece that helps to deflate the notion that Congressional Democrats and many on the left have been pimping lately: namely that “excessive deregulation” is chiefly to blame for our current financial woes.

I don’t really have time to summarise the whole thing right now, so I’ll just offer this quote:

Letting Freddie and Fannie get away with murder wasn’t deregulation. It was bad governance. And letting deregulation take the primary blame for a credit-fueled housing bubble and its aftermath isn’t an argument. It’s misdirection.

Today’s economy has done a lot to discredit the free market in the minds of a lot of people. Nanci Pelosi and friends are doing their best to put even more nails in the coffin and drooling over the prospect of the Federal Government assuming even more control over the commanding heights of the economy. Why let them go completely unchallenged? Read the rest.