Unbeknownst to Me

This woman is the poster child for privileged yuppies who gambled with their childrens’ futures and lost, but are unwilling to let go of the gamble to, you know, feed the kids:

When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.

Oh, goodness! Why, we’re all just a paycheck away from doomsd- wait, how do you blow through the savings you can earn with a 70K/year job in a month? Oh, right, you keep hoping your house gamble will pay off:

Guerrero is estranged from her husband and raising her two young children. She’s already burned through her savings to help make ends meet, and is drawing unemployment checks. She has had to take extreme measures to pay for her interest-only mortgage of $2,500 a month. In fact, her mother moved in with her to help pay the bills.

This is like the person who complains they’ve done everything to lose weight, and nothing works. Well, you know, everything except diet and exercise. Lady, you have a house. Sell it, and move in with your mom wherever she was before. Or move into the apartment you can afford off your husband’s child support and unemployment. But if you’re hanging on to an interest-only loan, it’s because you think the market is going to turn around any day now and you can flip it for a profit.

But wait, we’re not done with her “extreme measures”:

Guerrero even applied for food stamps, but was denied.

“I never used the system. I’ve been working since I was 15-and-a-half. I needed it now and it turned me down,” she said.

Maybe because they look at your balance sheet and say “Hey, what about this house thing you have listed under ‘assets’? Maybe you could sell that?”

If you made $70,000 a year, and presumably your husband made a little something too, then the idea that you’d gamble your children’s ability to eat on whether you could flip a house you’re not even paying principal on is pretty sickening.

To have burned through her savings in a month means she burned through $2,500 plus utilities and food. But with a $70,000 a year job, she should be bringing home around $4,000 a month. Which meant that despite making $1,500 over her housing cost, she couldn’t salt any of that away. And remember, this is before help from Mom or the soon-to-be ex.

What all that means is that this wasn’t “oh but for getting thrown out of work, there could go you or I,” but it means she had to make poor decisions and keep making them repeatedly to get into the mess she’s in. I feel bad for her kids, but I really can’t feel sorry for her. You made your bed, lady, now try really sacrificing like actual poor people do.

The rest of the article tries to be scary but can muster precisely zero data. All we have is a woman who kept making bad decisions and wants us to bail her out. As someone who didn’t jump on the house bandwagon, I’m pretty pissed off. I’d like to have a house, too. Who’s willing to pay my food bills to make that happen?

Here’s a piece I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, because it’s almost a perfect libertarian just-so story. It’s also why I don’t support the Lew Rockwell/Ron Paul style of federalist libertarianism.

Frequently I hear about how regulations are good to “address social problems.” Some of these, like sewage disposal or even restaurant cleanliness don’t bug me much or at all. Could the free market come up with a regulation system on its own? Sure, it can and it has. But if the government does it, the question for me is one more of means than goals. If government does it fine and everybody is happy with that, then so be it. Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.

But frequently “social problems” are “quality of life” issues, and the difference between a social problem and someone’s aesthetic preference are blurred to the point of incoherence. Whether it’s Rudy Giuliani banning crates on the sidewalk in the name of Law and Order or the local privileged white yuppie decrying the encroachment of Wal*mart from his favorite Starbucks, people on the left and right forget that the regulations that enforce a certain vision of how other people ought to live their lives can do real harm.

Case at hand: In Oregon, a state so beloved of government mandates that you can’t pump your own gas (yes Oregonians, everybody except New Jerseyans is perfectly free to grab that handle and pump and pump until they’re spent, without a lick or a spit of training), Measure 37 allowed people with rural tracts of land to parcel off pieces of it. In William Kitchen’s case, it was to give to his son and grandson as well as an acre to sell. But there wasn’t access to the parcels Kitchen intended to create, so he spent tens and thousands of his life’s savings to build a road from the main road to that part of his 32.25 acre lot.

Ah, but then Oregonians decided that they didn’t like housing going up on farmland. So people in the city voted to make people in the country keep their land in big, unbuilt lots, or make sure housing was as dense as possible to maximize the stretches of green.

Measure 49 now requires that landowners of high-value, exclusive-use farmland – such as the Kitchens – to subdivide in parcels no larger than two acres.

The problem is that the part he wanted to give to his son needed to be big enough to have a little space, and maybe, I dunno, farm a little. Still, they weren’t scofflaws, those Kitchens.

The Kitchens would have begrudgingly reduced Bill’s parcel to two acres, William said, but another provision of Measure 49 prevented Bill from building his house at the end of the road the family built.

The new rules also compel property owners to cluster new houses near existing homes, which would force the Kitchens to build Bill’s home close to Phelps Road and would leave the family with the road to nowhere

Well, surely the Republicans will put this right, greedy propertarians they!

“This was not the intent of Measure 49,” Rep. Patti Smith, R-Corbett, said, as she toured the Kitchen property. “It was created to fast-track small subdivisions like this. That’s what people voted for, and I think that is good land-use planning. This family did all they could do.”

Translation: we know better than you how to use your land, so suck it, Mr. World War II veteran. Next time build your road faster before we change our minds about what you can do.

Rep. Smith feels bad, and hopes the legislature will ease up on such people, because, um, families. Or something.

But not because there’s anything wrong with trying to decide one rule that will apply equally well to every situation millions of other people have.

Passing laws, even “good” laws like requiring vaccinations or making employers post signs to tell their staff to wash their hands, has a cost on the people being regulated. It may well be that the cost ends up being worth it for some other value (not having Salmonella). But just because the equation works out positively doesn’t mean there isn’t a negative in there.

Unfortunately, people extrapolate from the fairly few and sensible regulations that all regulations are without cost, because any benefit must outweigh the costs. They forget that real 83-year-old World War II veterans might have the fruit of a lifetime of hard work wiped out because someone thinks their life will be easier if they don’t have to think about all the ugly ways other people choose to live.

In this sense, “quality of life” regulations are no different from laws banning certain sex acts: they exist to make some people live the way other people would prefer they live, even without direct harm befalling the people who agitate for the restriction. Just because you think the one you agree with is better than the people on the other team who advocate for the one you don’t agree with, don’t think you’re not doing the same thing. You’re just goring a different ox. But an ox is still going to die a painful death.

South of the Mason-Dixon line, they voted their race.

North of the Mason-Dixon line, they voted their genitalia.

And as usual in liberal** Massachusetts, white men decided things.

* Oh yeah, I went there. I think god’s endorsement of Huckabee is in question.

** Seriously, blue laws and white men.

To better clarify why he should be President and drive home his message of freedom through “cede[ing] to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” Rudy neé Giuliani has announced he has legally changed his name.

Henceforth, he wishes “Giuliani” to be spelled “Giuli911″.

“Maybe Romney should have cried, too.”

Unfortunately, the guys at SCO disabled his choked_up() subroutine in the last update.

My friend Casey helpfully pointed to a study from a well-respected author, though working at an environmental organization. I snip the following from Table 8 of his piece:

	CO2	CH4
Total US emissions reduced by recycling (%)	1.5	9.0

These are the main greenhouse gasses (after water vapor, which stirs another thought, but we’ll get to that later), and recycling saves 1.5% CO₂ over what they would otherwise be. That’s nearly a rounding error, and probably close to his confidence interval, but we can say it’s at worst a wash with a less serious greenhouse gas being reduced noticeably (CH₄ at 9%).

So recycling is a net win, albeit a slight one, for greenhouse gas reduction.

That question settled, it brings to mind another question. Since it’s also fairly settled that, aside from aluminum, recycling always costs more than virgin production, the question turns to one of political economy: what is the opportunity cost of recycling? What other uses could the money spent on recycling be put, and would they get a bigger reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than recycling?

I’m not arguing anybody should stop recycling. All else being equal, it’s irresponsible not to recycle as much as you can. As an individual, using virgin products and landfilling your trash will definitely make your summers hotter and your weather more unpredictable.

Nevertheless, the public policy question of recycling versus other uses for the money should be asked, and answered with a view to the likelihood of implementing alternatives. If we could theoretically pump money into sequestration projects and reduce more atmospheric CO₂ than simply by recycling, it’s still pointless to stop recycling if the political capacity to transfer all those locally-spent funds to sequestration isn’t there.

But if we’re serious about global warming, it’s a good question to ask and answer.

Wonkette continues its slide into not only irrelevance but worse, humorlessness. Case in point, this “omigod, they’re like, so stupid” bit on the months-old Ron Paul donation “scandal”. The attempt at humor seems to be using the phrase “pig fucker,” which would be funny if it weren’t in the middle of a whiny rant that Kos or Atrios would want to punch up before publishing.

The idea is that, by keeping $500 from a guy who runs a white supremacist website, Ron Paul is somehow going to…I don’t know, invade Poland? Anyway, if he doesn’t give it to charity, the money will take hold of his soul, much like the shoes of a dead man posses you and cause you to kill the former owner’s murderers.

But the following comment apparently disappeared into the memory hole at Wonkette, reproduced here for the record:

Wow, so $500 is enough to get everybody at Wonkette to start killing Jews?

Awesome. That’s what I call hard-core capitalism.

Now, how much to be funny?

While a few holdouts still imagine a conspiracy of climatologists, most libertarians accept the reality of global warming. I’ve actually been convinced of this for a while, and a few years ago was convinced that manmade emissions were the primary cause.

So I’ve been looking for ways to reduce my own footprint. I walk to work, I drive a reasonably efficient car, take public transportation when it’s feasible, have a stock of compact fluorescent bulbs slowly replacing my old incandescents, and I recycle (I’ve actually done that last for around thirty years).

Acknowledging that carbon dioxide emissions are the greatest current environmental threat has had a bracing effect on the environmental debate. Objections to hydro, wind (I haven’t been a fan–no pun intended–because I’m a bird lover and only recently have those concerns been addressed), and even nuclear power have fallen aside due to their zero-emission of CO2.

In the face of this threat, it’s clearly time to reexamine our conventional thinking. Many libertarians–myself included–favor a carbon tax as the best, fastest way to move to a low-carbon lifestyle. Yep–we’re in it with Al Gore. But recently I’ve begun to think about recycling.

I’ve found numerous assertions on the web that recycling material emits less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But I haven’t been able to find data that consumer recycling actually does that in total. To follow me, let’s look at what has to happen:

1. A truck has to come and collect your waste. This is a separate truck collecting a lower volume of material per mile than your regular garbage truck.
2. That truck has to go to a processing facility, which has motorized conveyor belts to separate and verify each type of recycling–paper, plastic, glass, metal, etc.
3. Another set of trucks take the sorted material to a recycling plant.
4. That recycling plant uses varying amounts of possibly dirty energy to clean, process, or even melt down the items back into raw material (or in rare cases simply cleans the material for reuse, as in the case of the old green Coke bottles).
5. No recycling process to my knowledge is 100% efficient, so there’s some waste generated at this stage. After all, the wrappers on those cans and plastic bottles have to go somewhere, even if all the basic material were perfectly reused (which I’ll bet a lot of money it isn’t.
6. That recycling process will probably require other inputs, which require more trucks and mining/harvesting equipment, plus its own processing.
7. Once back into useable raw material, that material will have to go to another facility for re-manufacturing. Another truck run (unless it’s all together, but that seems unlikely to me).
8. That re-manufacturing plant takes energy.
9. That re-manufacturing plant requires still other raw materials, which require trucks and mining/harvesting equipment, plus its own processing.

In order for recycling to generate less carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) than using virgin material, that whole process must produce lower emissions than mining, transporting, refining, transporting, and manufacturing the original product. It isn’t obvious to me that the whole process will always work more efficiently.

Then you have to consider both the origin and fate of virgin material. Paper, for example, largely comes from forests that are planted just for the production of paper. So there is generally not much loss of forest in producing paper. That paper, if not recycled, goes to a landfill, where it and its carbon are buried–not in the atmosphere. Oxygen is generally unavailable, so decomposition and the return of carbon to the atmosphere is slow. So at least some of that carbon is now taken from a carbon sink (a forest) and sequestered (buried). Some of it will resurface, but some landfills also reuse methane emissions for power generation. Meanwhile a new crop of paper trees are growing, and the sequestration continues. There are possibly aspects I’m not considering, but I think this is a reasonable statement of the process.

Metal recycling, on the other hand, may be a big win. The energy required to melt it down is likely less than the total used to go dig up ore, extract the metal, and melt the result down. But I don’t know that for sure.

Plastic is a question mark for me. It seems like it could go either way, depending on the relative energy of virgin manufacture versus recycling, and to what extent recycling will displace the virgin material.

The good news for someone concerned is that I can’t see how the first two Rs of the three Rs of environmentalism–Reduce, Reuse, (and Recycle)–could not be wins for reducing carbon emissions. Certainly the material you don’t use is a win. And if something’s been produced, like a plastic spoon, every time you reuse it you’re replacing a whole chain of events that result in a new one (plus the whole chain of waste disposal). Reducing and reusing seem to be economic and environmental no-brainers, and I plan to continue washing plastic spoons in good conscience (mindful of the energy used to heat water for washing and treat it after I get it soapy).

So which is it? Have you seen reliable studies (as opposed to government, corporate, or activist pamphleteering)? Has someone specifically done these calculations?

I’ll probably continue recycling in the meantime. It may be a myth, but my conservationist senses tell me it’s better to reuse what you have rather than go disturb more habitat to get new stuff. But I’ll be ready to reconsider if the numbers come out against it.

But I’ll be looking for ways–within reason–to reduce and reuse without worry…unless someone can demonstrate that’s a myth, of course…

Ron Paul raised $4 million today, by my rough eyeball count.

4.

MILLION.

DOLLARS.

(not gold-backed)

Sure, I know this has all the weight of the Dean Campaign, except possibly less. I know the guy has a questionable history of crankery. I know he’s completely wrong on immigration and mostly wrong on abortion. But dammit if the guy hasn’t put out a much-needed reminder that liberty is something important, even in the Republican party.

Now if only Hillary could, I dunno, distance herself from Bush in foreign policy in some way. That might be a good answering move by the Democrats. Then they might see this kind of enthusiasm from someone besides billionaires.

And to those who say, “Well, sure, libertarians only give money when there’s someone saying what they want to hear,” I say, “Duh.” Try saying something we want to hear and some of that spare salary not used up by cheetos and World of Warcraft can find its way into your coffers.