Miscellaneous

[I’ll spare you TLF-ers all my ruminations about whiling away the summer playing at open mikes; check out Agoraphilia if that interests you. But I thought that you might get hoot out of my most recent anti-regulation song, Nice to Be Wanted. The link offers chords and other tips on how to play the song.  To nail the song’s Country and Western style, you’ll also need to get your twang on. Here are the lyrics:]

Nice to Be Wanted
Verse 1:
You prob’ly think I live a boring life.
I pay my bills. I love my kids and wife.
But you can bet I’ve got an outlaw side.
Listen up! I’ll tell ya’ how I ride. 

Verse 2:
For example, just the other day,
I turned right on a red—without stoppin’ all the way!
Then I hit 38, drivin’ back home,
Through a 35 miles-per-hour zone!

Refrain:
It’s real nice to be wanted, by a purty little lady.
It’s real nice to be wanted, by your lovin’ ma and pa.
It’s real nice to be wanted, by the folks who sign your paycheck.
But it’s not nice to be wanted, when you’re wanted by the law.

Verse 3:
But you know, I’m not the only one.
Some folks smoke and drink, before 21!
‘N I heard tell, some guy in Oregon,
Pumped his own gas, at the fillin’ station.

Verse 4:
A charmin’ lady down New Orleans’ way,
Dared to sell an unlicensed bouquet.
Her local florists don’t like competi-shun.
They play monopoly–but not for fun!

Refrain

Verse 5:
We can’t help it if we break some rules.
Politicians, and their fools,
Have rolled out red tape by the ton,
So they can keep us on the run!

Refrain

Coda:

The doggonned law.
The confounded law.
The nit-pickin’, lousy, frickin, ‘noveau-Prussian, freedom-crushin’, law.

Fin.

As always, I’ve taken care to nail down the legal citations. The reference to Oregon concerns a statute (O.R.S. section 480.330) that forbids retail gasoline customers from pumping their own fuel. (New Jersey imposes a similar restriction, but does not admit the same easy rhyme.) The Louisiana florist’s sad tale also proves all too true, as the Institute for Justice, champions for the would-be florist’s rights, can tell you.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]

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Randy Pausch, a computer science professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006, died today. You can watch his amazing and now-famous “last lecture,” delivered in September, here:

You can also buy a copy of his book here.

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I have a couple of TV appearances today, which might interest or revolt you. I did a taping at CNN today for a story on Lou Dobbs program about the E-Verify system. His show has a strong editorial slant and a bit of a reputation for cutting and pasting guests to make them look ridiculous. Perhaps what I said will come out as illustrated to the right.

And tonight I’ll be on a Fox 5 News segment in the Washington, D.C. area on Web sites that carry crime statistics and data – and sometimes criminals’ personal information. Criminal Searches is an example.

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Sorry, this post has absolutely nothing to do with the tech policy issues we cover here at the TLF, but since I do not have a personal blog of my own, I just couldn’t help but post this silly list somewhere. Late last night, I was reading Nick Carr’s blog and saw that he had picked up on some sort of online music meme about listing your favorite album for every year of your life. Oh man, this is just the sort of worthless Internet distraction that keeps me up till 2:00 in the morning thinking about it for no reason. And, sure enough, I actually fell asleep at my keyboard typing out my favorites. Finally finished the stupid thing at lunch today. Anyway, here it goes (favs first and runners-up after):

1969: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin II; The Doors – Soft Parade; Rolling Stones – Let it Bleed

1970: Miles Davis – Bitches Brew; Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin III, Freddie Hubbard – Red Clay; Van Morrison – Moondance

1971: The Who – Who’s Next; Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers; Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV, Pink Floyd – Meddle; David Bowie – Hunky Dory

1972: Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street; David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust; Roxy Music – Roxy Music; Steely Dan – Can’t Buy a Thrill;

1973: Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon; The Who – Quadrophenia; Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run

1974: Van Morrison – It’s Too Late to Stop Now; David Bowie – Diamond Dogs

1975: Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti; Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here; Kiss – Alive

1976: Eagles – Hotel California; Boston – Boston; Steve Miller – Fly Like an Eagle; Aerosmith – Rocks

1977: Pink Floyd – Animals; Steely Dan – Aja

1978: The Police – Outlandos d’Amour; Van Halen – Van Halen; Styx – Pieces of Eight

1979: Led Zeppelin – In Through the Out Door; Pink Floyd – The Wall; Van Halen – Van Halen II; The Clash –London Calling

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My colleague Will Wilkinson has a great commentary on Marketplace where he points out that more H1-B visas means less inequality:

Increases in wage inequality over the past few decades is primarily a story of the supply and demand of skilled labor together with the effects of technological innovation. Wage increases tend to track improvements in the productivity of labor and gains in productivity tend to be driven by innovations that help workers do more in less time. But in recent decades, technical innovation has increased the productivity of more highly-educated workers faster than it has for less-educated workers. These growing inequalities in productivity have helped create growing inequalities in wages.

But that’s not the whole story. The American system of higher education produces skilled workers too slowly to keep up with the demand. This scarcity in the supply bids up the wages of the well-educated even more, further widening the wage gap. If we raised visa quotas on skilled labor, that would help bring supply in line with demand and reduce the wage gap between more and less skilled workers.

These days, almost everybody but their beneficiaries think agricultural subsidies are a lousy idea. They benefit a few already relatively wealthy American farmers and agribusiness firms to the detriment of poor farmers around the world. But H-1B visa restrictions are subsidies that benefit relatively rich domestic workers over their poorer foreign peers, and so it turns out many of us liberal-minded college grads are enjoying our own protectionist boost.

In this case, it seems the moral outrage is… well, we seem to be keeping it to ourselves.

Will is spot on. And he’s greeted with a cacophony of condemnation from commenters who either don’t seem to have grokked Will’s basic argument, or who make nakedly self-serving arguments of the form: I have an advanced degree, and I don’t make as much money as I’d like, therefore we need to keep the brown people out to push up my wages. This has the virtue of candor, if nothing else, but normally when people advocate positions that benefit themselves at the expense of people less fortunate than themselves, they at least have the decency to pretend that’s not what they’re doing.

What virtually all of the commenters seem to be missing is that the costs of protectionism for high-skilled Americans falls not only on immigrants who are unable to make better lives for themselves, but also on less-skilled Americans who are forced to pay higher prices for goods and services produced by high-skilled workers. That I take to be Will’s point, and hardly any of the commenters seem to have even taken note of it, much less offered a coherent response.

Of course, this isn’t terribly surprising. People are rarely rational when their own self-interest is involved. No matter how wealthy or successful you are—and the people who are effected by H1-B increases are overwhelmingly among the better-compensated workers in the wealthiest country on Earth—it’s always possible to feel beleaguered. By world and historical standards, a software engineer making $80,000 a year is obscenely wealthy. Yet apparently many such workers feel it a grave imposition to be asked to compete on a level playing field with foreign-born workers, few of whom grew up with the privileges and luxuries that most middle-class Americans enjoy as a birthright.

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