Jacob Grier

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on an nineteen state effort to start imposing local sales taxes on internet purchases:

On Tuesday, Washington joins 18 other states that require some e-commerce businesses to collect sales tax. About 1,100 online retailers have volunteered to collect, and in return, Washington promises not to sue them for back taxes they might have owed. Three more states are on the way to adopting the law.

This isn’t an issue I’ve followed closely, but I’m generally in favor of tax-free sales as a useful form of competition that keeps local rates in check. (They’re not technically tax-free now, but the legal obligation to pay falls on consumers and is largely unenforceable.) Changing the point of taxation to the location of the buyer from the location of the seller also threatens to hit businesses with high compliance costs:

The law was poorly thought out, said Karen Evans, accounting manager at Aptech Systems Inc. in Black Diamond.

“I’ve been talking to our state representative, trying to figure out how in the world this legislation got passed,” she said. “I know there are reasons for it. Some of the bigger companies are pushing for it, but they’re doing it on the backs of all the small businesses around the state.”

The problems facing small businesses are two-fold. First, businesses must change their online software to recognize Washington’s 350 taxing districts.

“Ninety-nine percent of our sales goes out of state,” Evans said. “We’ve had to invest $1,000 so far for something that affects less than 1 percent of business.”

Second, if the law goes national, small businesses will have to decipher the thousands of tax codes in the U.S. and file tax returns up to several times per year for each of them.

And the end of this paragraph stands out:

The change does not affect deliveries to outside of the state, wholesale sales, services, sales of vehicles, aircraft, mobile homes or boats or towing companies. Florists also are exempt.

Why are books taxable and flowers not? No logical reason, florists just happen to have a well-connected lobby. That’s the kind of random exception that’s bound to creep into local tax laws, making life hell for retailers trying to keep track of them all.

My colleague Nicole Kurakowa reports on how Congress is stepping up to address the important issues of the day:

By a vote of 302-96 last week, the House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, a bold step on the road to outlawing pet monkeys. The House bill boasts 26 co-sponsors, including three from Illinois, Republican Mark Kirk and Democrats Jan Schakowsky and Luis Gutierrez. The Senate is expected to take up the companion bill in the next few weeks….

Did Congress step in because of an absence of pre-existing monkey regulations? No. The monkey industry does not operate in a vacuum; states have various restrictions on primate ownership, varying from licensing to breeding restrictions to total bans. If monkey-owning is your hot-button issue, as opposed to, say, taxes or abortion, you are free to move to a more monkey-permissive, or anti-monkey, state.

Read the whole thing here.

After the New Republic article about the Ron Paul newsletters came out, I worried that the money leftover in his campaign bank fund would go to an objectionable group. Fortunately, Paul is deciding instead to start a new project: The Campaign for Liberty, a fund raising group for libertarian-minded Republican candidates largely excluded from the party’s current ugly turn toward big government. He’ll also be holding a large rally in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention — though not in the convention, where he and his supporters won’t receive a warm welcome. ABC News has the story.

I haven’t been following the so-called “Ron Paul Republicans” very closely, but this seems like a good use of the money (and one that campaign donors won’t object to). Paul has always been better at raising money than speaking as a candidate, and funneling money to some successful, small government Republicans would be a good direction for the movement he energized last year to take.

[Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Long-time readers know about Dublin Dr Pepper, the only version of the drink still made with sugar cane. Tariffs and corn subsidies drove the switch to high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s. Unfortunately the Dublin plant has just a tiny distribution plant, making it a rarity outside of northern Texas. My friend Chad Wilcox introduced me to it a few years ago, and it definitely has a better taste. Chad notes that Dr Pepper week is coming up in Dublin, leading to this lengthy piece in the Dallas Observer.

In other drinks news, the Belgian company InBev is bidding for American brewery Anheuser-Busch. I can’t imagine how letting A-B getting taken over by Belgians could possibly make the company’s brews any worse, but nostalgic Americans are up in arms — including Missouri governor Matt Blunt, who’s looking for ways to legally block the deal.

It’s a big week for raw milk coverage, with stories this week from Marketplace and the Associated Press.

And finally, these seven deadly sins wine glasses spotted by BoingBoing are fantastic. Just don’t be the guy at the party who gets stuck with the envy stem.

Jason Talley uncovers disturbing evidence that the Invasion has infiltrated the very highest levels of American government. Jim Inhofe, we need you!

Jeff Steir of the American Council on Science and Health has a weird op/ed at The Politico today arguing that we should be talking more about Barack Obama’s former smoking habit:

Yes, Obama claims to have quit — and by doing so, he did reduce his risk of smoking-related disease. But the science tells us that it is naive to think that quitting after years of smoking returns you to the state of health of a never-smoker. In fact, after enough smoking, some health effects are irreversible. How long and how much one smokes determines the extent of health risk after quitting…

A 1998 study reported that the amount of fatty deposits in the carotid artery depended on total pack-years of tobacco exposure in a lifetime, not whether a patient currently smokes. A smoker’s excess risk of a stroke doesn’t return to that of nonsmokers until at least five, or as long as 20, years after quitting. It is possible that Obama would have to serve a hypothetical four smoke-free terms before his stroke risk returned to normal…

Just because he’s young, looks great and exercises doesn’t mean he’s completely healthy. And given what an important figure he is, to ignore his smoking history is to miss an educational opportunity.

The problem is that there’s currently no evidence that Obama is in bad health. And Americans, smokers and non-smokers alike, already overestimate the dangers of smoking; people smoke in spite of the risks, not because they are ignorant of them. So what “educational opportunity” are we missing by not discussing Obama’s use of tobacco? The lesson that you can be a lifelong smoker, quit when you want to, and grow up to be president? Unless Obama actually does suffer a stroke on the campaign trail, anti-smoking activists are probably better off not calling attention to the man’s longtime love of the devil weed.

This photo almost makes me want to vote for John McCain. Almost.

Though I might live there in the not too distant future, I still find this amusing. Seattle has spent millions of dollars on high-tech public toilets, only to see them shunned even by the homeless:

The naysayers may have been right: Seattle’s multimillion-dollar, high-tech public toilet program looks like a washout.

Some city officials, including the city’s wastewater utility director, want to remove the five automated, expensive and controversial toilets next year.

The large, self-cleaning lavatories went into service in 2004 — three years after the City Council used a rare show of force to authorize the program as an alternative to less attractive portable toilets.

Since then, the five stalls have cost taxpayers about $4.3 million. The money came from a tax on wastewater rates that cost the average single family household about $2.59 per year on an annual sewer bill of $465.

A recently completed report found the unattended toilets have been well used — both as they were intended, and as a refuge for drug use and dealing, booze drinking and prostitution. Some homeless people now avoid the toilets because of the social problems they attract, the report found. Meanwhile, there’s been a steady increase in how much human waste crews clean each day in downtown alleys and walkways.

The toilets will likely soon be gone. The tax increase that funded them, however, will stay in place.

Foreign policy can be expensive, especially for a city government. Berkeley’s learning this the hard way:

Berkeley is finding that having its own foreign policy isn’t cheap. The city’s recent dustup with the U.S. Marine Corps has so far cost the city more than $200,000, while businesses say they’ve been slammed by related protests.

And that’s on top of the $1 million the city spends annually on domestic and foreign policy matters hatched by its 45 citizen commissions, which outnumber those in virtually every other city in America and debate everything from regime change in Iran to the plight of nonneutered dogs…

Some of Berkeley’s commissions provide critical city functions, such as the zoning board and Planning Commission, while about half are devoted mostly to policy. There are commissions on the status of women, animal welfare, aging, disability rights, labor and early-childhood education. Three commissions deal with the environment. Four pertain to health.

Each commission has nine members, each of whom is appointed by a council member, and meets monthly. Many have subcommittees, such as the Peace and Justice Commission’s subcommittee on U.N. treaties. And every commission has a city staff member assigned to compile agendas, minutes and reports, and ensure that the board complies with the state’s open meetings law and Robert’s Rules of Order.

Manuel Hector spent 10 years as secretary to the Peace and Justice Commission. His regular job was working on employee safety and special events permits for the city’s Health and Human Services department, but as much as 25 percent of his work time was spent researching oppression in Burma or labor conditions in Liberia for the commission.

I’ve often thought that, given my natural contrarianism, a move to the West Coast would do me good. Being surrounded by hard-working policy wonks and journalists in DC just makes me want to craft espresso drinks. Being in Berkeley, I might actually be motivated to put on a tie and get fired up about combating idiocy.

It’s a good thing this product wasn’t available for Mitt Romney. Poor Seamus would have had an even more terrifying road trip.

Previously:
Seamus, that’s the dog, was outside

It’s not because of its big government leftism; that’s to be expected. What I really dislike about the page is that only gives opposing space to big government conservatives, the kind of people who are just like the editors themselves, except that they happen to vote Republican. David Brooks and William Kristol don’t exactly contribute intellectual diversity (or, in the latter case, intellectual anything).

Today’s case in point is an op/ed contribution arguing that John McCain isn’t really a conservative. Because he’s eviscerated the First Amendment? Because he makes a federal issue out of every little thing? Because he’s hawkish on foreign policy? Nope, because he’s a fairly solid supporter of free trade — one of the few issues redeeming the candidate in the eyes of old school conservatives.

Update 3/6/08: Dan Griswold, Dan Drezner, and Megan McArdle all slap the piece around more eloquently than I did.

Washingtonian has written up the presidential cocktails at Off the Record in the Hay-Adams. They’re mostly just classic cocktails renamed (and overpriced!), like the McCain Manhattan. It’s only worth mentioning for the fact that, as in life, only the Ron Paul cocktail offers something different from the rest of the pack. It’s too bad they didn’t give Ron a Cosmopolitan instead, if only to add one more institution to the Orange Line Cosmotarian Conspiracy Cabal.

[Thanks to Chad, whose blog has returned after a month of technical difficulties.]

Whatever that means, it apparently allows using government connections to hobble your competitors. Google is disappointingly, yet predictably, considering using anti-trust laws to oppose the possible Microsoft takeover of Yahoo!:

With Microsoft bidding nearly $45 billion to buy Yahoo, Google has begun to lay the groundwork to try to delay, and possibly derail, any deal. Google executives have asked company lobbyists to develop a political strategy to challenge the acquisition, which could threaten Google’s dominance of Internet advertising. Google’s top legal officer posted a statement Sunday that criticized the proposed deal…

Microsoft enlarged its Washington staff in the late 1990s after it came under antitrust assault in the Clinton administration. Its lobbying shop is considered among the most effective in the capital, and it has retained more than 20 law firms, lobbying companies and press relations operations for an array of political and regulatory issues.

Google’s Washington office is less than three years old and has been steadily growing. In fall 2006, it established a political action committee and has since used Democrats from the Podesta Group lobbyists, two former Republican senators — Connie Mack and Dan Coats at the law firm of King & Spalding, and the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Google recently moved to larger quarters, with 27,000 square feet of space including a game room, open work areas, free lunches and environmentally friendly features like recycled rainwater — a smaller version of its Silicon Valley headquarters.

David Boaz lamented Google’s entrance into Washington back in 2006.

Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section included an op-ed from my Cato colleague Tom Firey and I on Virginia’s proposed smoking ban. Amazingly, we’re against it! The section also featured Reason editors Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie telling Congress to butt out of baseball’s steroid controversy.

At Volokh, Ilya Somin writes about the opportunity cost of donating to the Ron Paul campaign. That is, given how things have turned out, think of what better use these dollars could have been put to in the hands of a group like the Institute for Justice.

A more troubling cost is how the remaining money may yet be spent. From my understanding of the law, Paul could donate leftover millions to a non-profit organization of his choosing. Yes, I believe this includes the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the group that’s been vocally supporting Paul and that’s currently headed by the guy widely thought to have been his frequent ghost writer when the offensive newsletters were published.

11 CFR 113.2(b) provides [pdf]: “In addition to defraying expenses in connection with a campaign for federal office, funds in a campaign account . . . [m]ay be contributed to any organization described in section 170(c) of Title 26, of the United States Code . . . .” [meaning organizations who may receive tax-deductible contributions.]

I’m not a lawyer, so I may be incorrect. However this seems like a direct application of the law. For those of us who donated to the campaign, this would not be a thrilling outcome.

That Ron Paul bumper sticker looked so good on my Pontiac Aztek. Now I have two things to be embarrassed about when I drive.

Between Paul’s 1996 responses, his current non-response, his likely dishonesty on CNN, and his continued close association with the rumored author of the newsletters, I’m through hoping for a sufficient apology. As David Boaz writes at the Cato weblog:

Ron Paul isn’t running for president. He’s not going to be president, he’s not going to be the Republican nominee for president, and he never hoped to be. He got into the race to advance ideas — the ideas of peace, constitutional government, and freedom. Succeeding beyond his wildest dreams, he became the most visible so-called “libertarian” in America. And now he and his associates have slimed the noble cause of liberty and limited government…

Those words are not libertarian words. Maybe they reflect “paleoconservative” ideas, though they’re not the language of Burke or even Kirk. But libertarianism is a philosophy of individualism, tolerance, and liberty. As Ayn Rand wrote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Making sweeping, bigoted claims about all blacks, all homosexuals, or any other group is indeed a crudely primitive collectivism.

Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.

Ron Paul appeared on Wolf Blitzer today to talk about his old newsletters. It’s on YouTube, parts one and two.

Paul repudiates the charges of racism, apparently to Wolf’s satisfaction. He denies knowing who wrote the articles, knowing how to find that out, and reading them when they were published. These last three claims are hard to swallow.

Watching the videos, my impression is of a good man whose sense of integrity is pulling him in two different directions. Pulling in one direction is his honesty; in the other, his loyalty to old friends. Sadly, he’s chosen the wrong friends, and he’s misguidedly protecting them at the sacrifice of his own reputation.

Then again, perhaps I’m just reading libertarian blog rumors into the situation. With neither Paul nor the author(s) coming forward, it’s too damn hard to be sure.

Update 1/11: The rumors are going mainstream. Here’s The Economist naming names.