Science

Conflicts of Interest Inside of Government

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You know, it amazes me that people never see conflicts of interest internal to government itself. The USDA guidelines are  a prime example.

Think about it. The guidelines purport to be an objective assessment of what food we should all buy and consume, but what is the USDA primary mandate? Oh, yeah, to advance the interests of agricultural producers in the US. It’s the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of People Who Eat.

Like all “regulatory” agencies USDA has long ago succumbed to regulatory capture, and now exists largely as just a means for people who make their livings in agriculture to advance their economic interests using the power of the state. The USDA only has an institutional incentive to advance the welfare of food producers. The USDA has no institutional incentive to look out for the welfare of food consumers.

By sheer coincidence, the USDA recommendations for the percentage of a particular type of food we should eat always seems to roughly parallel the relative economic size of the agricultural sector that produces that food. I wonder why?

One of the biggest reforms we could make in government would be to legally separate promotional, regulatory and research powers.

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Profit Motive vs. Power Motive

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The Cost of Energy is a blog dedicated to energy issues that shows up in one of the side bars from time to time. Each time I’ve read a post there it’s been one sneering at anyone who questions the absolute certainty of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  In this post, he is ostensibly  complaining about some critic of CAGW (BTW, characterized as akin to one who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust) cherry picking some piece of data or the other.

I didn’t bother to check into that complaint because what caught my eye was the snippets he had highlighted, especially this part:

Mike Beard is a free-market conservative and pro-business. No one who calls himself those things can afford global warming to be true.

It is an article of faith among all leftists that anyone who has a profit motive is instantly more untrustworthy than those who nobly eschew profit for the pursuit of  political power. In their own minds, leftists are an intellectually superior group of altruists whose predictions are always instantly more accurate than the predictions of those with grubby commercial interests.

Yet in recent history we had a major event that demonstrated how the “pure hearted” leftists flew off into a destructive flight of self-interested fantasy, while those observers who were “free-market conservative and pro-business” not only had a more objective understanding of the problem but provided a solution that benefited everyone.

Back during the energy crisis of 1973-1984, we had the exact political dynamic that we see with CAGW: On the Left we had the clear-eyed altruists only wanting the best for everyone, while on the Right we had the self-deluding, incredibly greedy and selfish energy companies who only cared for their short-term profit at the expense of everyone else.

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DoubleQuotes and Questions

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

You know, I really enjoy building my DoubleQuotes. They can be entirely frivolous, as is this one, for instance:

with its touch of gothic — a taste I share with my friend Bryan Alexander.

Or they can work like a Necker cube, offering opposite framings with which to view a single topic — in this case, video games.

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Does anybody in Chicago use Direct TV ?

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I live in the mountains east and north of Los Angeles. Last summer, when I bought my house, I ordered Direct TV for television service as the cable company wouldn’t even schedule an installation until the escrow closed. I had no complaints about the TV service until the first snowfall. I had no service for two days. I called Direct TV and was told that snow interferes with the signal (duh !) and there was nothing I could do. I had a satellite dish in New Hampshire in 1994 and 95 and never had this problem. The next time it happened I called and finally got to a technical advisor who told me there was such a thing as a dish heater but Direct TV had nothing to do with them. He did give the URL of several web sites where I could get more information. I found that I would have to install the heater myself and the dish is nearly 20 feet above my upper deck.

Last weekend, when we had more snow, Cindy was atop a seven foot ladder trying to reach the dish with a broom but with no luck. The angle of the dish, which catches more snow, makes it impossible to brush the dish off. It seems to be a pretty common problem and one would think that Direct TV would anticipate these problems in areas with substantial snowfall. Maybe they could supply the dish heaters as an option, especially when the dish is mounted so high. Then the technician could install both. The new dishes also seem to be of a deeper chord and the location may determine the angle of elevation to the satellite. New Hampshire is a higher latitude, as is Chicago, and that dish seemed to be flatter in my recollection.

Does anybody in Greater Chicago use these dishes and do they have problems like this ? I got nowhere with them, and am not about to try to install a heater on the dish, so I finally canceled and will have to pay a substantial early cancellation charge.