The Blog with No Name

To read something like this gives me joy and hope for our political process. A self-described “brain-dead liberal” confesses his change in views, embracing a less polemical view of the world (and I’d say much more realistic). It is refreshing, honest, and thought-provoking. Even though I’m sure the author and I would disagree on many things, at least we’d both agree that everything is not “magically wrong” and the government is often not the answer. I especially appreciated his last point. The people we meet in our every day lives, regardless of political persuasions, are the ones with whom we live and on who we depend. Happy election season indeed!

Here’s an interesting take on economic and legal lessons that can be drawn from The Godfather.

A choice quote:

Everyone remembers Don Corleone’s famous saying that he’s going to make “an offer you can’t refuse.” But for some reason, people forget that the Don also said that “a lawyer with his brief case can steal more than a hundred men with guns” (Godfather, pbk. edition, 52). One of the recurring themes of the novel is that people turn to the Mafia for help because of the corrupt and self-serving nature of many political and legal institutions that systematically allowed elites to plunder the politically weak. Puzo recognized, as sociologist Diego Gambetta explained more systematically, that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite. To a lesser extent, a similar dynamic enabled the America Mafia to emerge in Italian immigrant communities in the early 1900s, as Puzo vividly portrayed in his chapter on the rise of Don Corleone.

Puzo also shows how Prohibition and afterwards the War on Drugs, provided opportunities for organized crime to grow and flourish. It was Prohibition that enabled the Godfather to go from being an “ordinary . . . businessman” to a “great Don in the world of criminal enterprise” (pg. 213). And, of course, the great Mob war that forms the central plot of the book is a conflict over Don Corleone’s unwillingness to help other crime families expand into the illegal drug business.

Here’s a quick follow up to my original post on Porkbusters. Porkbusters site has a rather depressing update to busting pork in Alaska. Check out this exchange between a reporter and Don Young:

REPORTER: Isn’t there a bunch of stuff in that highway bill, at least 24 billion dollars, that could be taken out and used for the people in New Orleans and Mississippi and the places that were affected?

REP. YOUNG: No! That money is not there! That money is for transportation! That is not added pork. See, that’s why the whole media — Wall Street Journal, yourself, respectfully, you know, Sam Donaldson — don’t know what the hell you are talking about. This is grandstanding by individuals that don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ll go back to that. It’s ignorance and stupidity.

You can check out a video of this here (Young’s got a neat office and a super goatee).

I’ve seen two different estimates for the cost of the Bridge to Nowhere: $315 million and $223 million. Knowing how government projects tend to run over-budget, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the higher estimate.

Ha ha:

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

Money quote:

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

Yup, you bet.

(via Drudge)

UPDATE:
My fire-and-forget posts often don’t work out too well for me. Kyle appropriately smacks me for not doing my homework. Eliciting my response where I link the actual study and actually put a smidgen of thought into the issue. Right now, I’m deciding between whether this study is either just another one to be thrown in the Stack of Studies or a clarion wake up call for theists in the U.S. to get their sh** in order. If you don’t want to read the comments, the bottomline is that the news article mangled the study. Surprise surprise.

Finally, here’s some food for thought. This is the opening graph of the study’s discussion:

The absence of exceptions to the negative correlation between absolute belief in a creator and acceptance of evolution, plus the lack of a significant religious revival in any developing democracy where evolution is popular, cast doubt on the thesis that societies can combine high rates of both religiosity and agreement with evolutionary science. Such an amalgamation may not be practical. By removing the need for a creator evolutionary science made belief optional. When deciding between supernatural and natural causes is a matter of opinion large numbers are likely to opt for the latter. Western nations are likely to return to the levels of popular religiosity common prior to the 1900s only in the improbable event that naturalistic evolution is scientifically overturned in favor of some form of creationist natural theology that scientifically verifies the existence of a creator. Conversely, evolution will probably not enjoy strong majority support in the U.S. until religiosity declines markedly.

This puts an interesting spin on the evolution vs. creation debate.

Point ofLaw.com has an interesting post about the overwhelming number of liberals on the faculty of the top law schools in the US. Quoting from a NYT article:

The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.

The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties.

I can’t say this surprises me. I suppose I’m a little impressed by the numbers though. I would have guessed the percentage of Democratic contributions would have been around 70-80%. The article points out, this favoritism towards Democrats is inbred into the institution of law school:

“Academics tend to be more to the left side of the continuum,” said David E. Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern’s law school, where the contribution rate to Democrats was 71 percent. “It’s a little worse in law school. In other disciplines, there are more objective standards for quality of work. Law schools are sort of organized in a club structure, where current members of the club pick future members of the club.”

It’s a shame the world of legal education runs this way. It’s also a shame when candidates for a law professorship or tenure have to hide their opinions or identities so as to not cut their own throats. One of the writers at The Volokh Conspiracy has adopted a nom de plume precisely for this reason. Jim Lindgren, who also writes for Volokh, weighs in on the study as well and offers an interesting thought experiment:

The Times article raises the question whether it matters if there is political diversity on law faculties.

I have two answers–one substantive, one speculative. First, in my studies with the General Social Survey, political ideology is the strongest predictor of views across a range of hundreds of issues that I’ve looked at–stronger than race, gender, education, class, occupation, age, region, marital status, etc. Those who say that labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” are meaningless today are frankly uninformed. Most survey researchers know that these labels are quite salient.

Second, a professor at the Harvard Law School told me that in 1988 he asked every member of the Harvard Law School faculty with even a hint of conservative or Republican leanings whether they favored or had voted for Bush in 1988. Only one had (1 out of 60-80 faculty); all others favored Dukakis. He also said that in about 2 or 3 dozen entry-level faculty hires from the mid-1970s through about 3 or 4 years ago (when they hired an entry-level conservative), the Harvard Law School had not hired a single Republican.

Now consider this thought experiment: [Imagine that in 1988 all but one of the Harvard Law faculty had favored Bush1 over Dukakis. And] Imagine that over the same period of a quarter century [mid 1970s through early 2000s], the Harvard Law School had hired at the entry-level only those who leaned Republican. Imagine how different the Harvard Law School would be, how different legal education would be, how different the government (and public policy) would be, populated with lawyers trained by an overwhelmingly Republican Harvard faculty. Somehow I think it would be a different world.

It’s not clear to me how much difference there would be. It seems there would be a vast difference in the American legal world just because those who train the next generation would have a different view of the law, which, persumably, would be passed down to their pupils. However, on the other hand I think there may not have been much. It seemed to me that most students who went to law school already had well-formed political beliefs and were commited to them. The chance of a law professor changing a student’s beliefs seems pretty slim to me. But maybe this is because I’m a right-winger. I think it’s safe to say that any right-of-center individual going into law school knows he or she is walking into a political lion’s den and is steeled against the opposition. Republicans are a rare breed there — though not so much at Willamette thanks to the large Mormon population! — and a breed not always welcomed. Personally, I kept my mouth shut about political issues, and never once revealed my political orientation, praying none of my classmates found my blog. I did this for a variety of reasons, one of which is I am a wuss.

One final thought brought out by the PointofLaw post is this: even if the liberalness of law professors doesn’t have that much influence on the students, they may have significant influence on the public’s perception of the law.

While law school is, for most, a rigorous but expensive trade school, law faculties form opinions in young lawyers and also hold claim to speak to the public on what the academy thinks.

A GC of a public company who criticizes the Ernst v. Merck verdict, for example, is presumed to represent the views of “big corporations” when a newspaper reporter calls, but a law professor who teaches torts is presumed to speak commonly-accepted truths that are free from personal bias.

The public’s inability to see the flaw in this thinking is, to an extent, a shortcoming in the public’s understanding of the law and legal education. I don’t know how many times non-lawyer friends and relatives have referred to a public case only to ask “can they really do that?”. They look amazed when I explain that “anybody can sue anyone else for anything — the only question is how much the parties are willing to pay in legal fees to see it through.”

Much of the public seems to think that the law is a static, well-defined set of rules to be navigatived by lawyers who know what those rules are. Most lawyers, however, know better that the law is fluid and dynamic, capable of suprising reversals, and more susceptible to guesswork than to definitive answers. Legal rules — some in harmony and some in conflict — represent potential points of leverage in disputes between parties, rather than fixed points of universal understanding.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the stupidest things about law school. A school that rolls its eyes in amusement at “Truth” and teaches its students how to bend rules into leveraging tools is a joke.

Willamette starts classes again this week. I won’t be there, and I’m damn glad.

I meant to get this one posted sometime last week, but, well, it didn’t happen. Better late than never! About a week ago, after reading some Wodehouse, I flipped through the latest Seattle Weekly, and read this book review of Divided by God by Noah Feldman. The beginning of the review sold me on the book, which I intend to read sometime soon, but the end of the review, where the critic responds to the book, was almost appalling. I’ll quote it in full:

Feldman’s plan would be perfect—except for the fact that the Bush Evangetaliban is all about coercion and money. Its goal, as Esther Kaplan documents in With God on Their Side, “is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile.” The imams of the right won’t stop with symbolic victories. They want gays in re-education concentration camps, teenagers in madrasas preaching Values Evangelism and Intelligent Design, All Things Considered (it could be renamed One Thing Considered) replaced by religious hate radio. They aren’t kidding, and they are winning. Feldman’s mistake is to think that Values Evangelicals value anything but brute power.

I have a different compromise to propose. Why try to be united? Americans, red and blue, have no common national vision and never will again. Feldman’s own insightful quickie history proves our belief groups have fissioned steadily for centuries. Instead, on “values” issues, permit each municipality to declare itself red or blue, on the model of dry and booze-permitting towns. If all Florida rots into an ignorant, befouled backwater run by corrupt judges and Bush oil theocrats and overrun with pregnant teenagers who remain coke-addicted drunks until discovering Jesus at 40, like George, let them have their place for that. Red America, send us your gays, your morning-after-pill doctors, your science teachers yearning to breathe free! This country’s big enough for both of us—as long as we stay divided. Meanwhile, one suspects only the blue half of America will read Feldman’s book. The red half will probably burn it.

The reviewer’s frenzied disgust for the other half of the population is palpable. His take on the American right is so far out there I think it’s a safe bet he has never really met a member of the religious right and takes his cues from moonbat left. A couple of days later I got an email from the guys who run Spirit of America containing an email forward that offered a highly informative juxtaposition with teh above passage about the identity of America. The forward claims to be written by an Australian dentist and ends like this:

An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek.

An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan.

An American may also be a Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim.

In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world.

The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need.

When the Soviet army overran Afghanistan 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!

As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

Americans welcome the best, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes. But they also welcome the least!

The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America.

Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001, earning a better life for their families. I’ve been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 other countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must.

Hitler did.

So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in the history of the world.

But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.

I know which view I like better.

I wish this article (which goes well with the discussion Micah and I are having) was more informative about terrorists motivations, but it is an interesting and quick read about the two camps seeking to explain the motivation of terrorists. Here’s the gist:

For some experts, the attacks - whether in London or Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt - are aimed at the West for what it is doing: in other words for its policies, like the war in Iraq. Others insist that the perpetrators are more at odds with the ideals of the West and “who we are.”

For the latter group, this is a war of civilizations or ideologies that the West has no choice but to fight aggressively, because anything else would entail appeasement and imply a retreat from identity and principles.

This is a difficult and often touchy debate. Personally, I just find it hard to believe that our policies only cause Muslims to blow themselves up in some type of violent protest. There’s something truly sick about these people, and the what-we-do explanation is hugely deficient in explaining it.

UPDATE: It occurred to me today that I’m not being thoroughly consistent in my position because there is one American policy that I would admit does incite a gross amount of hatred against us in the Muslim world: our support of Israel. So, a more honest statement of my position is that Al Qaeda and their ilk hate us for who are are as infidels and, to make it worse, infidels who support Israel. And to be even more honest I would have to say that there are times when what we do incites hatred. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me if a man who had his family blown to smithereens by one of our errant bombs would want to pretty much kill as many of us as possible. However, I contend there must be something greater and more sinister that motivates the thousands of Islamofascists who want to destroy our country and the entire culture of the West.

The NYT reports on a recent survey that found most high school students aren’t being stretched enough. I’m not sure how accurate this survey is, but its findings are encouraging in that high school students want more of a challenge, responding, “they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting.” I see a couple of alternate ways to read this that are less positive. First, the word “interesting” gives the students a lot of weasel room. Who knows what the respondents mean by “interesting”? It may be that to a large majority of them a class is only interesting if they get to watch movies or read comic books all day. My suspicion is if the question asked if the students would work harder if the classes were just more demanding that fewer respondents would answer in the affirmative. Second, this is a survey with no real ramifications for the students. I’m sure it feels good for them to answer they would work harder if they were required to, but they would probably balk at the idea of actually doing more work.

The survey also found that fewer than two-thirds thought that “their school had done a good job challenging them academically or preparing them for college.” This is probably pretty accurate, and I feel fortunate to say that I would have been in the minority with this question. I thought my high school did a superb job of preparing me for college, and I know many of my friends felt the same. Those who dropped out or are considering dropping out gave interesting reasons that are in sync with the rest of the survey’s findings:

. . . only about one in nine cited “school work too hard” as a reason for not remaining through graduation. The greatest percentage of those who are leaving, 36 percent, said they were “not learning anything,” while 24 percent said, “I hate my school.”

I thought this was interesting too:

Mr. Tucker said American schools had been too slow to adapt high school curriculums to the real-life demands of college and the workplace. Except for that small fraction of highly motivated students with an eye toward prestigious private colleges and state universities, many more students, he said, are under the impression that just having a diploma qualifies them for the rigors of college and the workplace.

American schools are slow to adapt, eh? Can’t adjust to the work place fast enough? They just can’t keep up with the job market? Hmmm, what does adjust quickly and is more flexible than monolithic bureaucracies? Private businesses. Oh, but that’s just too silly to work isn’t it?

Fallout from Kelo already.

With Thursday’s Supreme Court decision, Freeport officials instructed attorneys to begin preparing legal documents to seize three pieces of waterfront property along the Old Brazos River from two seafood companies for construction of an $8 million private boat marina.

The court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that cities may bulldoze people’s homes or businesses to make way for shopping malls or other private development. The decision gives local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.

Better watch what land you buy . . . the city might want it.

(via the Volokh Conspiracy)

Greg has a quick post covering a recent bill proposed in the DC city council. The councilwoman proposed a ban on public alcohol consumption using the same lines of reasoning as public smoking bans. Greg picked out a couple of good quotes:

Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, R-At Large, introduced her bill in response to a proposed ban on smoking in those same establishments. Her proposal imitates the arguments for a smoking ban, citing health concerns, worker safety and the nuisance of drinkers.

“I never thought I could ban drinking just because I didn’t like it, but now I know I can,” Schwartz said. “The impending smoking ban has empowered me.”

Several hours later, Schwartz pulled the bill, saying she had made her point. She hoped the incident would serve as a “wake-up call that once you start toying with people’s liberties, you never know where it might end.” …

“Let’s be honest, people are dying,” Schwartz said, mocking arguments from other council members on the smoking ban. “Pure and simple, drinking kills.”

Fellow council members Kathy Patterson and Jim Graham rolled their eyes and shook their heads.

and

“People are still free to drink at home - for now,” Schwartz said. But she said beverages at bars and restaurants should be limited to “tea, sodas and milk.

“And if the drinkers insist on drinking alcohol - and they will - they can just step outside on sidewalks with their flasks and drink.”

As I have mentioned before, I’m not a fan of the public smoking bans for a variety of reasons, but as long as it’s just states and and cities doing it I’m not going to get my boxers too much in a bunch over it.

Here’s WFB’s poignant, pity response to the question. I wish I could write and speak like he can.

Sen. Frist just announced the cloture vote will be on Tuesday. AUGH! And I’ve had CSPAN2 droning on and on for the good part of 2 days. Senatorial debate is not the most exciting thing ever. I’m not sure where the Senate got the title of “The Greatest Deliberative Body in the World,” but it makes me sad to think that this might be true. I guess it got a little exciting when Ted Kennedy started getting red in the face and yelling. Fire and brimstone! I love it! Of course, this is a filibuster, so most senators are shooting to fill up the time not the history books. I swear I heard the same speech from 10 different senators. The only comforting thing about it was that some times it sounded like they were basically reading right off of the paper I wrote. I’m not sure if that means I wrote a good paper or a really bad one.

National Review has added some nuance to its position on filibusters. Back in December they adopted the position that instituting rule changes to end the Democrat’s filibustering would be a “mistake.” Now , the editors opine, “For Republicans to leave the filibusters in place now after months of demanding a change would be ignominious.”

National Review’s own Jonah Goldberg calls this a reversal, but I’d say this is a mischaracterization. Ponnuru has already responded, ” . . . what’s inconsistent about suggesting that it may have been wrong to go down a particular road but that now that we have, we ought to go forward?” This is how I’d interpret it too. Though I disagree with NR that changing the rules is a “mistake,” I do agree with them that for the GOP to suddenly give up this fight would be politically disastrous. It means they would have had their teeth kicked in by a party that’s completely in the minority. They may have picked a bad fight, but they better end it or they’ll be getting more bruises later.

NR might have some inconsistency in their position, but at least they aren’t blatantly inconsistent as the New York Times.

It’s tough writing about evil on such beautiful spring days, but evil doesn’t take the sunny days off.

Greg has an excellent post about the non-story of human rights abuses in North Korea and how Saddam’s human rights abuses were a non-story before the Iraq War. In fact it was such a non-story that even the New York Times doesn’t remember it being brought up. Indeed, I remember one of the most convincing arguments for the war was the human rights situation. But back to North Korea, Greg points to a saddening article by Christopher Hitchens, who visited North Korea in 2000, about the situation there. It’s a nightmare:

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn’t prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged “guest.”) Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

I think this needs to be kept in the forefront of our minds when we’re thinking about the North Korean situation. It shouldn’t be just about whether they have nukes, and they can hit us. It shouldn’t be that they’re one of our old Commie enemies. It shouldn’t just be about possible aggression against South Korea. It should be all of these things and the fact that there is unspeakable evil occurring in that darkened state.

Greg also points to a maddening op-ed by Nick Kristof on Bush’s back-pedaling concerning the genocide in Sudan. Kristof credits Bush with doing a lot in the early days, largely because Republicans and the religious right were making noise about it. Now, he seems to have switched to softer (more diplomatic?) tactics in order to preserve what he has accomplished. I realize that the situation is delicate, but I think there’s a time when our own losses should be damned and we choose the greater good. The greater good here is saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

UPDATE: Back to North Korea, James Na discusses the continual attempts it has made to destabilize South Korea. North Korea not only brutalizes its own population but also is belligerent to its neighbors.

I never thought I’d do this, but I’m linking to Daily Kos. My dear friend Kyle sent me the link for this very interesting, though long, diary post about coal mining. The author spends a good deal of time establishing his bona fides before he launches into his discussion of the coal mining industry. He expresses some concern that he might lose his job for what he is says, but I think this is a little overwrought. I don’t think he wrote anything especially damning. But then again, maybe the bosses of coal mining are especially vindictive.

Everybody knows that strip mining is an ugly, polluting business. At least that’s the common wisdom of the day, but apparently this is incorrect. Today coal mining operations are very careful about repairing what they destroy:

Reclamation is meticulous, so well done I don’t even expect you to believe it. In a typical situation, the topsoil and a good part of the subsoil are removed from the area and stored before mining begins. Large surface rocks that are part of the natural landscape are also removed. A biological census determines the species mix for every acre of land to be mined. When mining is complete, the surface is returned to a condition as close as possible to the original contours. Streambeds are replaced layer by layer. Topsoil is restored. Those surface rocks are put back just where they were. A plant mix that hits the original species mix down to the most esoteric weed is put in place. In fact, the mining industry keeps several greenhouses in business to produce everything from twisted pinyon pine to herbs that are sacred to Hopi healers. The reclamation is, by far, the most expensive cost in surface mining. The people involved are almost to a person folks with degrees in wildlife biology, fisheries, agriculture, and related fields. These people think of themselves as environmentalists. They’re good at their work. The results are nothing less than amazing.

I can guarantee you, absolutely guarantee, that if I put you in a surface mining area of Wyoming or New Mexico or Arizona, you would not be able to tell me what land had been mined, and what land had not. I know you still don’t believe it. But I tried.

Frankly, I found this to be almost unbelievable. It’s hard for me to imagine that this actually happens. In my mind strip mining goes hand in hand with vast “otherworldly” deserts completely devoid of life, not completely restored forest vales.

Also the days of cave-ins, black lung, and other dangerous work conditions are gone. Now, coal mines don’t use dynamite, have ventilation systems that rival office buildings, and are much safer than many other jobs. Meanwhile, coal power plants have only gotten cleaner even as they increased output. The amount of pollutants coal plants pump into the air is a tiny fraction of what it was in the 1970’s.

But there is a catch to all of this, and this is what’s wrong with the coal mining industry:

The coal industry has done all those neat things. They’ve made it safer. Made it cleaner. Reclaimed the land. Why did they do it? Because we friggin’ made them do it, that’s why.

. . .

Every evidence is that they can mine coal safely, they can mine coal without destroying the land, and they can clean up emissions. They can make a profit at it, too, as the major companies are breaking all records while meeting these requirements.

But they won’t lift one damn finger unless we make them. Without regulation, they would backslide in a heartbeat, and without more regulation, they won’t take another step.

While this isn’t surprising to me in the least it is saddening. I believe our system of economics is the most viable system in use today, but one of the great costs of capitalism is the devaluation of morals and values. Of course many, perhaps most, businesses are ethical and moral in a general sense, but there are businesss that by their very nature make it easy to dispense with the ethics in favor of the profits. So even though I’m usually opposed to governmental regulation of the economy I do realize that because of human nature it is required in some situations. I think the regulation of coal mining provides a good example of governmental regulation gone right.