Bastiat’s Bastions

Recently on BasilandSpice.com, there was an article about suggestions from The Center for Science in the Public Interest concerning the safety of Gulf oysters and the very real dangers of eating oysters harvested from warm waters at warm times of the year.

In the article, The Center for Science in the Public Interest suggests to governors of the various states to ban the importation and interstate sales of Gulf Oysters.  This suggestion, however, is quite troubling, as there may be better ways to provide this safety.

I should first be upfront and state that I live in coastal Louisiana, where most commercial Gulf of Mexico oysters are harvested.  One of my colleagues across campus from me helped Ernie Voisin develop a high pressure technique for treating oysters for Vibrio Vulnificus.  This technique is used by Mike Voisin, an area businessman, to treat the oysters he markets.  I work on an economic development authority, a local governmental body, with Mr. Voisin, who chairs the body.  So, I come from the area where these oysters are harvested and work with people whose businesses might be enhanced from such regulations.

Oysters, particularly from warm water, are dangerous to eat raw.  Any raw shellfish is risky.  Thorough disinfecting and techniques to avoid cross contamination should be practiced in any kitchen serving shellfish.  I love to eat oysters any time of the year.  However, at warmer times, I eat them only after they have been cooked!  A ban on interstate sales of Gulf or any other oysters is just unnecessary.  Warnings, consumer information, might be more reasonable.  In case the well-meaning folks at The Center for Science in the Public Interest are unaware, oysters are not only eaten raw, at least, here in Louisiana, we often cook our oysters.  I enjoy chicken and turkey, too, but I always sure fowl is thoroughly cooked.  After problems with spinach and lettuce contamination last year, I make sure that I do not eat or serve unwashed lettuce or spinach.

Should there be bans on interstate sales of lettuce or spinach because some people fail to wash their lettuce?  What about on chicken or pork?  Of course not.  Instead, buyers should be made aware of the risks of eating certain foods in raw or unwashed conditions.

Warnings on menus and on containers about risks of oysters in warm months should suffice to keep us safe from Vibrio Vulnificus.  Maybe it is because I am from coastal Louisiana, but for as long as I can remember, there has been a common rule of thumb regarding consuming raw oysters: “only eat raw oysters in months with an ‘r’ in the month.”  This means never in May through August.  I would be more cautious and add April and October to those months to avoid raw oysters.  For instance, the regulations in Louisiana on raw seafood can be seen here.

Now, there are raw oysters that are completely safe to eat, such as those treated with high pressure, and those who want to eat raw oysters in the summer should look for these oysters.  While not endorsing Mr. Voisin’s hydrostatic high-pressure treated oysters in any way (Bastiat’s Bastions is hosted on a state taxpayer-support server, and I use my taxpayer-provided computer to write this), I do wish to point out what Mr. Voisin’s company has to say about their treated oyster on their website.

Cooking oysters is another way to avoid the risk of Vibrio Vulnificus.  This is far safer than relying on government agencies which may fail to maintain perfectly maintain safety in the food supply.  When I think about the great variety of ways to cook oysters, I hear in my mind the voice of “Bubba” from “Forest Gump” where Bubba goes on for what seems like days reciting all of the names of shrimp recipes.  I am not sure if there are as many ways to prepare oysters, but I think it might be close. A simple search for “oyster recipes” on your favorite search engine is bound to turn up something both tasty and healthy.  So, cooking and washing works far more effectively than regulation.  Why should people who know how to cook be kept from this ingredient just because some people do not know how?

However, eating only cooked oysters, treated oysters or not eating them at all will not keep you safe from this disease. Exposing an open wound to warm seawater is another path to infection of Vibrio Vulnificus, making cuts and scratches at the beach quite dangerous, especially for anyone with a compromised immune system.  Opening raw oysters to cook them should also be done with care, as it is easy to get scratched or cut by the rough and sharp edges of an oyster in the process.

The Centers for Disease Control has an excellent page dealing with Vibrio Vulificus. The University of Georgia and the University of California have an excellent webpage on oyster safety, as well.

-MC

Take a look at this article  on BasilandSpice.com, where many of our Bastiat’ Bastion posts are reposted.  Fellow BasilandSpice Blogger John Mason writes about what is happening to the money supply and different components of the money supply, such as cash held outside of banks.  After you read the chapter on the Money Supply, you will make more sense of what he is talking about.  Then you can comment.

-MC

In only a few days, with little in the way of committee input, with no coverage of the process, once again a backroom deal is being crafted that will have a huge impact on the lives of Americans with this new health care legislation.  Since there seems to be very little understanding in Congress of how we got into the mess we are in with continuously rising premiums so that more and more find the premiums unaffordable and opt out of coverage, we rush headlong into a total makeover of the health care system with little thought of the consequences.

Let’s think about some of the consequences of this plan. Of course, like Congress, we won’t look at the reaction of businesses that are being forced to provide health care coverage for employees who have little education and little skill, and so, are both low-productive and low-wage workers, whose payroll costs will soon be higher than their revenues.  Like Congress, we won’t look at businesses destroyed and employees who become unemployable because they are now unaffordable.

We are told that the costs of this new government-provided benefit will, in all actuality, be a rich-provided benefit, provided of course, by gunpoint from the IRS.  Unlike Congress, let’s see how it affects the great majority of Americans who have been paying for their own health care plan for years, those not so rich that they will see their taxes go up, just those whose premiums will shoot up and those whose doctors will tell them that by-pass surgery is no longer being covered or that it will take 5 months to see an oncologist and then another 4 months for surgery and then another 4 months for any follow up treatments.

As Congress and state legislatures have mandated more and more to be covered by the health insurance plans in their jurisdictions, the demand for health care has risen, pushing up prices dramatically.  What many of us have not noticed, is for years, the providers of health care, the doctors, nurses, and hospitals, have had protections from new entrants into their markets in the forms of licensing and occupational control over access to medical and nursing education while legislature have placed limits on hospital competition.

Here is the problem.  With more and more seeking health care under these new legislative mandates, but with the providers of health care limited by their occupations and by government restrictions, and doctors only having so many hours in the day to work, somebody will denied care, coverage or not.  There is nothing I have heard of in any plan from Congress that increases the flow of doctors into the country, either form new doctors and nurses or from experienced doctors and nurses from other countries.  Without more health care workers, especially doctors and nurses, more demand through extended coverage will either mean rationing through higher health care prices so that those who cannot afford their co-pays will not seek care or rationing by telling certain people that their condition will not be treated.

So, by covering more people without expanding our human and physical resources to be able to actually treat more people, someone will not get health care.  Many of those who will be denied care will be those who have paid for years.  Like my own congressman, I have not had time to read the whole bill, and like my congressman, I probably will not be able to.  However, if the legislation or what it becomes in the future through “fixes” that will have to be imposed because of the haste and thoughtlessness of the Obama legislative agenda, does not include ceilings on health care prices, the prices we pay for health care and for our health care premiums will go through the roof.  Price limits will only mean shortages that will show up with longer and longer delays in diagnosis and treatment, just as we see ever expanding waits for care in Canada. In 2008, it took about 4 months to see a specialist after seeing a general practice physician.  It also takes months to get treatment after the initial trip to the specialist.

One vivid picture of government-run health care is painted by the 1992 movie called “Article 99″ . you have not seen this movie about too many patients in a VA hospital to be treated, try to find it from your favorite video store.

Besides contacting your senator, what can you do?  Perhaps you should consider increasing your life insurance coverage.

-MC

Many on the conservative side have had many negative things to say about the “Cap and Trade” system.  It should be pointed out that “cap and trade” itself, is not  the source of their ire.  Rather, many conservatives do not like limitations being placed on CO₂ emissions in the US. 

What is this “Cap and Trade” system that is being implemented in the new climate change bill?  Cap and Trade is merely an approach to regulating emissions, and it is one that efficiently reduces those emissions.  It contrasts with two other approaches: one that is called the “command and control” approach to regulation and the other is an approach that taxes emissions, such as the proposed “carbon tax” to regulate greenhouse gases a decade ago.  Before looking look at these regulatory systems, let’s look at the ideal environmental regulatory outcome.

At first glance, it would seem that no pollution would be the best regulatory outcome.  Think of what this would mean when we consider CO₂ as a pollutant.  We inhale oxygen, but if CO₂ is a pollutant and we want no pollution, then, we better hold that breath.  But we cannot.  Stopping all pollution is just too costly. Anything we do to reduce our pollution will cost us something. But, of course, pollution itself is costly, either health costs, or aesthetic costs, or costs in losses of biodiversity. The ideal, then, is really to keep the total costs of pollution and the costs of reducing that pollution to a minimum. 

Generally, each extra ton of emissions of CO₂ causes the added costs of pollution to increase.  Also, if we look to reducing CO₂ emissions, we can find some inexpensive ways to cut emissions, and after we cut emissions in those ways, to cut emissions further, we would have to employ costlier and costlier means.  To keep these total costs to a minimum, the added costs from cutting a ton of CO₂ emissions have to equal the added costs of the damage done by another ton of CO₂ emissions.  If the added costs are higher from the damage done from another ton of CO₂ than from cutting emissions, we could lower total costs by cutting emissions.  On the other hand, if the added costs of cutting emissions by a ton are higher than from the damage done from another ton, total costs could be lowered if we go ahead and pollute that ton.  The “right amount” of pollution, then, is the amount where another ton would cause costs of cutting pollution by the same amount as the costs of the damage done by another ton of pollution.

Of the three methods of pollution control to understand, the easiest to understand is the “command and control” system.  Here, the regulatory commission sets requirements for each source of pollution, monitors them for compliance, and then sets fines and punishments for those who fail to comply with the regulatory requirements.  Here, possible polluters just do what they are told or face extremely high fines or other punishments.  The “command and control” name for this regulatory type comes from the management form used in the military.  Historically, most of regulation of the EPA has been of this “command and control” type.  The best way of thinking about this approach is to recall the lines from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade:”

Theirs not to make reply

 Theirs not the reason why

    Theirs but to do or die.

 This command and control system of regulation does not do a very good job of keeping costs of regulation down, nor does it do a good job of balancing the costs of damage with the costs of reducing emissions.  The regulatory authority just does not have information on all of the costs.  This information is mostly diffused throughout the society—various electric power generating companies have a good idea of what their costs of cutting emissions are like, so a lot of people have bits and pieces of this information, and no one knows it all. 

One of the earliest regulatory suggestions for reducing the costs of pollution control was made by A.C. Pigou in 1920 in his book, The Economics of Welfare (with the word “welfare” meaning “wellbeing”).  Pigou suggested that a tax could be levied on certain activities, such as pollution, that would give people an incentive to reduce those activities.  Economists in the 1960s and 1970s saw that such a tax would get polluters to reduce pollution in a least-cost way.  Any producer who could reduce emissions at a cost below the tax would do so, while those who could only cut their emissions at a higher cost would not.  Suppose the tax on emissions is $100 per ton.  All pollution reduction that costs more than $100 per ton will not take place, but pollution reduction that costs less than $100 per ton will take place.  Lower cost cleanup activities replace higher cost cleanup and costs cannot get any lower.

A little later on, economists came up with a slightly different approach.  The environmental regulatory authority would first decide how much emissions would be allowed, create “pollution rights” which would be tradable.  Polluters who could reduce pollution very cheaply could then reduce their emissions and sell their rights to those who could only cut their emissions at a very high cost.  If the price of a pollution permit were higher than the cost of cutting emissions, the producer could then reduce their emissions and sell off their permit.  If the emission permit sold for a price below the cost of cutting pollution, the emitter would buy up permits.  If you think that such a scheme is unworkable, think again.  We have been using tradable permits of this sort to control SO₂ emissions that cause acid rain since the 1990s, and these permits trade on the Chicago Board of Exchange, along with various commodities.

The Pigou tax on pollution, which we saw a decade ago called a carbon tax, gives polluters a constant price to respond to, and the total amount of emissions could be higher or lower and can change over time.  If the costs of cleaning up go up, we end up with higher levels of emissions.  On the other hand, the tradable permits system produces a constant level of emissions but with a price of pollution that varies.  Both of these methods minimizes the costs of cutting pollution because both produces a price for cleaning up so that those with costs of cutting a ton of emissions above that price do not cut their pollution and those with costs of cutting a ton of emissions below that price do cut emissions.  Only the low-cost emission cutters reduce their pollution while high-cost emission cutters do not, and face either taxes or having to pay for pollution permits. 

For global pollutants, such as greenhouse gases, there could be international trade in CO₂ permits.  This is the general idea behind “cap and trade.”  For this to work well, however, there would have to be a global monitoring agency that could monitor each source of CO₂  emissions and would be ready to punish those polluters who do so without a permit.  This is the part of “cap and trade” that faces the biggest difficulties.  Remember that real regulation is not done by Soloman-like regulators who are infinitely fair, but by actual people, like international soccer referees, so that various human biases rather than fairness would show through in international environmental regulation.  The problem of political bias and lack of information in regulation is seen in this warning from Pigou himself (Some Aspects of the Welfare State,” Diogenes 7:1-11 (1954), p. 10.):

It must be confessed, however, that we seldom know enough to decide in what fields and to what extent the State, on account of them could usefully interfere with individual freedom of choice. Moreover, even though economist were able to provide a perfect blueprint for beneficial State action, politicians are not philosopher kings and a blueprint might quickly yield place on their desks to the propaganda of competing pressure groups. “Fancy” finance, like a fancy franchise, whatever its theoretical attractions, has, at all events in a democracy, dim practical prospects.

“Cap and Trade,” itself is a good idea.  It is a market-based approach to efficiently reduce the amount of emission of CO₂.  The real difficulties are first, setting the right amount of emissions to allow and second, monitoring and regulating by a global authority, giving up sovereignty to regulators who are likely to want to tilt the playing field away from favoring Americans.  Before going down the road of regulating CO₂ through any approach, we should be very sure of what human reductions in CO₂ will actually accomplish and whether there are alternatives that might work better, such as re-forestation of large areas of the planet.

-MC