Second Thoughts

“General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars” is an article I wrote for Transportation Quarterly. At the time it appeared there were some significant reviews.
The article discusses the historical transition from streetcars to buses during the period 1915 to 1960 and why it was a normal economic event and had little to do with General Motors despite the pervasive myth that blames GM. Extensive use is made of contemporaneous documents.
The article has been moved to this website.

We write almost daily about the Honolulu rail project on www.honolulutraffic.com

Following is the first three paragraphs of an article by Matt Ridley comparing natural gas extraction to wind farming. I hope it will encourage you to read the whole of this very excellent article.

“Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air. The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5-megawatts (working at roughly 25% capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50% efficiency) in its first ten years.

“Difficult choice? Let’s make it easier. The gas well can be hidden in a hollow, behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on top of hills, because that is where the wind blows, visible for up to 40 miles. And they require the construction of new pylons marching to the towns; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

“Unpersuaded? Wind turbines slice thousands of birds of prey in half every year, including white-tailed eagles in Norway, golden eagles in California, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania. There’s a video on YouTube of one winging a griffon vulture in Crete. According to a study in Pennsylvania, a wind farm with eight turbines would kill about a 200 bats a year. The pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.”

Read on from this link.

By Joel Klein, Wall Street Journal (c), 5/10/2011.

Here are a few paragraphs from Joel Klein’s op/ed today; read the entire piece.

“Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”“costing more than $100 million annually are the more than 1,000 teachers who get full pay to perform substitute or administrative duties because no principal wants to hire them full-time.)

“Then there were the several teachers accused of sexual misconduct—at least one was found guilty—whom union-approved arbitrators refused to terminate. The city was required to put them back in the classroom, but we refused to do so. Of course, the union has never sued to have the teachers reinstated. It just makes sure these deadbeats stay on the payroll with full pay and a lifetime pension.

“It’s little surprise, then, that American kids don’t get the education they deserve.”

“Union power is why it’s virtually impossible to fire a teacher for non-performance. In New York City, which has some 55,000 tenured teachers, we were able to fire only half a dozen or so for incompetence in a given year, even though we devoted significant resources to this effort.

“The extent of the problem is difficult to overstate. Take “rubber rooms,” where teachers were kept—while doing no work—pending resolution of disciplinary charges against them, mostly for malfeasance, like physical abuse or embezzlement, but also for incompetence. The teachers got paid regardless. Before we stopped this charade—by returning many of the teachers to the classroom, unfortunately—it cost the city about $35 million a year. (Still

Here are just three paragraphs from Donald Boudreaux’s brilliant op/ed in today’s Wall Street Journal to encourage you to read the whole piece.

“Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—”for free”—from its neighborhood public supermarket.”

“No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.”

“Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families’ choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.”

To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, When a deranged individual shoots people, there is an immediate call for banning guns while doing nothing whatsoever about deranged individuals.

What follows is the first three paragraphs to entice you to read the whole piece which is linked below:

In the November General Election, 124,000 Hawai‘i voters chose to mail in their ballots. That was a third of all ballots cast and more than double the percentage of those mail-in votes cast in the 2008 election. More importantly, mail-in votes were far greater than the typical difference in the votes cast for the winning and losing candidates.

The danger to all of us is that we really do not have any assurance that all mail-in voters did so free of coercion. Secrecy is vital if we are to assure ourselves that their votes are taken freely. Secrecy concerns should far outweigh the benefit of the mere convenience of mail-in balloting.

We go to great deal of trouble to ensure that secrecy is maintained at the polling place but we have no assurance at all that mail-ins voters have secrecy — and they are a third of the voters now.

Click here for the fully footnoted version of this piece.

Arthur Brooks had a fine op/ed in the Hawaii Reporter yesterday concerning the charitable giving habits of the “selfish” tea-party people and the “caring” progressives.

It turns out that surveys show that as a percentage of incomes the tea-party types give far more of their incomes than do the progressives.

Read Brooks’ whole oped; it is well worth the time spent.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute. This is reprinted from AEI and the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, Donna Wong, head of the environmental group Hawaii’s Thousand Friends, criticized Governor Abercrombie’s hasty approval of the Final EIS on Channel 4 KITV.

The governor’s press secretary, Donalyn Dela Cruz, said the EIS got a very thorough review, first by the Lingle administration and then by Abercrombie’s staff. “An approved EIS doesn’t mean there won’t be impact — it just means all the potential impacts have been studied.”

We can now all feel a lot better about that.

Today I received my copy of CAGW’s ratings of members of Congress.

For 2009, Senator Inouye (D-HI) was bottom ranked in the Senate co-equal with Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Senator Akaka (D-HI) was in the next worst category along with 11 other Senators.

In the House both Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Rep. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) were in the lowest rank along with 90 other representatives.