Reason Magazine - Staff > Katherine Mangu-Ward

Open Skies

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Airline deregulation isn’t very sexy, but trips to Paris are. Thanks to the former, the latter are about to become a lot easier and cheaper. Under the “Open Skies” agreement, which went into effect at the end of March, any airline—American or European—can now fly to any airport on either side of the Atlantic.

Previously, the takeoff and landing points for transatlantic flights were covered by a complex series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and each of the destination countries in Europe. Now carriers will be able to choose the routes they think people will want to fly and make arrangements as they see fit. The hottest property so far is London’s Heathrow Airport. Before the agreement went into effect, only United and American Airlines were allowed to fly there from the United States. Before the year is out, additional carriers will offer direct flights from Detroit, Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, Raleigh-Durham, and Los Angeles.

“We don’t even begin to get a glimmer of the possibilities of open-market competition yet,” Jerry Chandler, who writes Cheapflights.com’s travel blog, told the International Herald Tribune. “There could be a lot of flourishing of routes in markets that currently don’t exist, especially from smaller U.S. cities to European hubs.” Of course, the market for flights is far from unfettered in the United States, with restrictions on ownership, public dominion over airports, and the occasional bailout clouding the skies.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the ultra-cheap Irish carrier Ryanair, has said flights from secondary European cities to secondary U.S. cities are in the cards, perhaps for as little as €10 (about $16). Plan your romantic vacation now: dirt cheap flights from Liverpool to Providence—at last!

Pirates Ahoy!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Piracy—the sort involving eye patches and parrots, not folks who sell bootleg DVDs—has been on the upswing in recent years. Even in the digital age, the stuff we buy travels mostly by boat, and oil is still pumped at vulnerable offshore oil platforms.

According to the International Relations and Security Network, pirate attacks cost about $16 billion annually in ship and cargo losses and increased insurance premiums. Enormous container ships are especially vulnerable at “choke points” such as the Malacca Straits, which connect the Pacific and Indian Ocean, where pirates in smaller, quicker boats can pull alongside and board.

Enter private security companies. Businesses and governments alike have been hiring firms with names like Seawolf Marine Patrol to raise the cost of doing business for pirates. The privateers ride shotgun with cargo vessels and train sailors in the use of small arms.

Tom Ridenour, director of maritime operations at the private security firm Blackwater, thinks protection against pirates is a growth market. New offerings from the firm will include a ship capable of deploying small rigid-inflatable boats, helicopters, and a 30-man security team. As of now, there is no demand for the ship. But Ridenour told ISN Security Watch, “we’ve applied the Kevin Costner ‘field of dreams’ concept. If you build it, they will come.”

Data: Meth Math

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In March meth was back in the headlines, and this time the prognosis was cheerful: The nation’s largest drug testing company, Quest, reported that the share of job applicants and employees testing positive for methamphetamine fell 22 percent between 2006 and 2007. At the same time, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a report highlighting a 31 percent decrease in the number of illegal meth lab seizures in the previous year. Drug czar John Walters boasted that restrictions on the sale of the meth precursor pseudoephedrine and crackdowns at the Mexican border had reduced meth use by restricting the supply and raising prices. “When we are able to put strategic pressure on the supply of these drugs,” he declared, “what we’re seeing is a direct effect for the better on the number of users.”

There’s a significant problem with that theory: A closer look at data on drug use from several sources, including Quest, shows that meth consumption had been declining for years before the feds swung into action. Decreases in usage is more likely due to the cyclical nature of drug fads than to the government’s assault on domestic labs and Mexican traffickers.

Education for Profit

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

By many measures, the University of Phoenix is the most successful institution for higher education in American history. With more than 325,000 students currently enrolled—22 times the number at the University of Chicago—Phoenix is vast, and contains multitudes. On campuses scattered across 39 states, and online as well, it offers everything from associate's degrees in sports management to Spanish-language MBAs. And unlike most universities, Phoenix makes a hefty profit. Its parent company, the Apollo Group, produced margins of 11.7 percent last year on revenue of $2.9 billion. What began in 1976 as a small night school where firemen and policemen between shifts completed unfinished bachelor's degrees is now an educational and commercial powerhouse listed on NASDAQ, with a market capitalization of $7.4 billion.

But in recent years, the University of Phoenix has become the poster child for everything the mainstream academic establishment thinks is wrong about for-profit higher education. The school's aggressive recruiting practices and high dropout rates have drawn fire from The Chronicle of Higher Education, where a college admissions specialist in 2004 called Phoenix's approach "an affront to the principles that have been developing in college admissions over the last three decades." The head of the major accreditation body for business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, last year accused Phoenix of using "a lot of come-and-go faculty." The U.S. Department of Education has punished the school for insufficient hours spent in the classroom and illegal recruiting practices, exacting two settlements during the last decade totaling $15.8 million. "Their business degree," Henry M. Levin, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, told The New York Times last year, "is an MBA Lite."

Many of the criticisms are technically accurate. The school does have aggressive recruiters and skimpy class hours. The faculty is nearly all part time. Graduation rates are low, and the level of instruction can be too.

But much of what academic traditionalists see as problems, Phoenix advertises proudly as solutions. The university aims to meet underserved demand for post-secondary education, tailor-made to fit the individual circumstances of harried adults. Like other for-profit schools such as DeVry and ITT, Phoenix offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage: not the best product the industry has to offer, but a potentially valuable option for people who might not otherwise get into a desired market.

As with subprimes, a nonnegligible portion of consumers won't be able to stay afloat, exiting school moderately poorer and perhaps not much wiser. But the students who do graduate—like the millions who use subprime deals to gain a firmer foothold in the housing market—have a much different story to tell. Their tales are not about sunshine on the quad, Saturday night football games, or ivy-covered walls. They're about a kind of practical, bare-bones education that you never see in coming-of-age films but that is usually superior to no education at all.

At the same time, the size of the Phoenix student body—like the number of homeowners during the recent bubble-has been artificially inflated by policies set in Washington. There are legitimate criticisms of the university. But the education establishment's hostility to the institution often lies elsewhere, in an attitude toward for-profit higher ed that is essentially an aversion to change and commerce, the same snobbish disdain directed at payday lenders, providers of adjustable rate mortgages, and inner-city fast-food vendors. Few sins are less forgivable in polite society than offering poor people products they actively seek.

From ‘Plague Spot' to Juggernaut
For-profit higher education is nothing new in America. Up through the 19th century, most doctors, lawyers, and accountants picked up their basic skills at schools that were out to make a buck. The army of typists and stenographers that midwifed the information age at the turn of the last century came pouring out of commercial institutions all over the country. One hundred years ago, most medical schools were still small trade operations run by practicing local or retired doctors as a way to supplement their income.

But in 1910, amid newspaper horror stories about quack doctors ("The Doctor Who Killed His Patients With Germs") and fears that the U.S. was falling behind the rest of the world ("Germany to Stop Quackery"), the Carnegie Foundation sent the prominent educator Abraham Flexner to survey the state of medical education in North America. The influential Flexner Report, which singled out Chicago's 14 mostly for-profit medical schools as "the plague spot of the nation," called for standardizing curriculum and dramatically reducing the overall number of diplomas issued. As a result, the 160 institutions that educated more than 28,000 med students in 1904 became 85 schools educating half that many in 1920. (Among the effects: a decrease in medical competition and an increase in doctors' fees.)

The Progressive Era also saw the creation of the modern research university. Schools such as Princeton, with its Institute for Advanced Study (founded by Flexner himself), hit on the magic formula of combining under one roof undergraduate education, graduate and professional training, and academic research. Universities expanded and began to swallow smaller medical schools. By 1935 there were only 66 medical schools left in the country, 57 of which were affiliated with universities, according to a study by the University of Virginia radiologist Mark Hiatt and the D.C.-based consultant Christopher Stockton.

After World War II, the baby boom and the GI Bill helped usher in the "golden age of higher education," a three-decade stretch in which America went from a country where two-thirds of adults hadn't even managed to complete high school to one in which more than 17 percent earned a college degree. Not coincidentally, this era was also the golden age of public funding for universities. Federal and state research grants and student aid became major sources of revenue for public schools and nonprofits. In 1972 Congress allowed for-profit colleges to sidle up to the government trough as well. Now students were allowed to carry what would eventually be called Pell grants with them from school to school; as with vouchers, the money adhered to the student, not the institution.

John Sperling was a middle-aged professor of humanities at San Jose State University in the mid-1970s when he decided to take advantage of what he saw as a gap in the market by risking his life savings, a whopping $26,000, to start a private school. According to Phoenix's official history, Sperling hatched the idea after realizing that "working adult students were invisible on the traditional campus and were treated as second-class citizens."

Initially, there was little more than a facility in San Jose called the Institute for Professional Development, dedicated exclusively to adult education—that is, education for students past their early 20s. At the time, Sperling found, it was taking adult students in the U.S. about eight years to finish a typical four-year degree, in part because nearly all university business happened during work hours. Even if classes were offered at night, the rest of the campus was typically closed, forcing full-time workers to take time off just to register for class, meet with a professor, or buy a book. By offering extended hours and a host of other individualized tweaks, Sperling made it possible for older students with jobs to satisfy all the requirements for a college degree in about four years.

Sperling's fledgling school left San Jose in 1976 and struck out for Arizona after being denied accreditation (not for the last time), in this case by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. (Nonprofit regional accreditation bodies certify most schools in the U.S. based on site visits and other measures of quality, though schools do not need any accreditation to operate.) The Institute for Professional Development was reassembled as the University of Phoenix, winning accreditation from North Central Association of Colleges and Schools the following year.

The school grew quickly, graduating its first full class in 1981 and gaining accreditation for a nursing school in 1987. In 1989 it inaugurated an online campus. A few years later it launched an online library, one of the first of its kind, offering course materials and reference books that might otherwise require students to dig through the stacks of an academic library—a time-consuming luxury many Phoenix students can't afford.

Although the university is now best known for its online programs, in which students log on for lessons and group projects and deal with their professors via email, it has more than 200 physical campuses across the country, many of which are little more than leased rooms in buildings near a convenient highway off-ramp.

‘Every Academic Decision Has to Be a Business Decision'
Phoenix first attracted widespread attention when Sperling took his company public in 1994. Since then, the press notices haven't been especially flattering. When the school tried to expand into New Jersey in the late 1990s, New Jersey Education Association Executive Director Robert Bonazzi complained to the Newark Star-Ledger that "pre-packaged programs such as these are the antithesis of any known definition of [academic] freedom."

The criticism has intensified during the last few years. In a series of breathless stories culminating in a comprehensive takedown last year, The New York Times aired accusations by prominent educators, former students, and current and former staff members that at Phoenix "the relentless pressure for higher profits...has eroded academic quality." The story highlighted the school's low graduation rates, numerous sanctions from regulators, and a mounting concern that Phoenix was taking taxpayer education dollars without providing promised services in return. David W. Breneman, dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, told the Times that "Wall Street has put them under inordinate pressure to keep up the profits, and my take on it is that they succumbed to that." Or as James Samels, president of the Education Alliance consulting firm, put it to the Dallas Morning News in 2004: "One cannot serve two masters. They've got investors, and they have a different mission."

University of Phoenix President Bill Pepicello readily agrees that Phoenix has a different orientation than a traditional school. "A successful for-profit higher education enterprise has to survive on the tension between the academic side and the business side of the house," he says. Students want low tuition and easy classes, so there is always commercial pressure to ease academic rigor. Part-time instructors are cheaper, and a standardized curriculum handed down from on high produces lower transaction costs. "Every academic decision has to be a business decision" Pepicello says, "and, conversely, every business decision is an academic decision." Pepicello, whose previous role at Phoenix was as a dean of academics, thinks for-profit education's reputation is "tainted by earlier endeavors," such as cash-for-paper diploma mills. "Bad business decisions and bad academic decisions left a bad taste," he says.

Phoenix offers a much more substantial education than fly-by-nights like degrees-r-us.com. But there's another aspect of its business decisions that does leave a bad taste.

Asses in Classes
Phoenix's business model relies on federal tax dollars. In 2004-05, its 300,000-plus students received a total of $1.8 billion in federally supported student loans, making it the biggest single recipient of student aid in the country. Because the school, unlike elite universities, receives zero government research grants, every one of those greenbacks from Uncle Sam comes attached to a student, usually in the form of a Pell grant. This leads to a very simple equation: More students equals more money. The school helps students apply for the maximum amount of aid they're eligible to receive and speeds the processing of the government money into their coffers. Phoenix has every incentive to be aggressive in its recruiting practices.

Too aggressive, says the federal government, which in return for ladling out Pell grants attaches several strings to the money. The tension between gobbling up federal aid and satisfying the conditions that come with it is at the heart of Phoenix's legal and reputational troubles. In 2004 a Department of Education report alleged that the university had violated the Higher Education Act by offering financial incentives and free trips to its most successful recruiters, those who, in the recruiters' slang, put the most "asses in classes." Phoenix has paid $9.8 million to the Department of Education for recruitment violations, and in January 2008 the Apollo Group was found liable for fraud because it failed to disclose the report to investors. That decision came with a price tag of about $280 million paid to investors.

I ask President Pepicello about accusations that the university pays commissions based on how many students recruiters enroll, regardless of academic qualifications. "We don't apologize for that," he replies. "Recruiters, as much as anyone else, should have responsibility for what their job description is." Pepicello points out, accurately, that what the law prohibits is paying recruiters "solely" on the basis of enrollment numbers, and he "vigorously" denies that the university does so.

As the University of Virginia's Breneman writes in his 2006 book on for-profit education, Earnings From Learning, "Such practices...are one of the key reasons why economists and others have doubted the wisdom of providing education through the mechanism of for-profit production." According to Breneman and other critics, overly aggressive recruitment leads to Phoenix's high dropout rates.

Using the federal government's standard measure of completing a degree within six years, Phoenix's graduation rate is just 16 percent, compared with nearly 50 percent at traditional schools. That measurement captures only 7 percent of Phoenix's total enrollment, since students who come into the institution with some prior college are not counted, but the school declines to release detailed figures for the remaining 93 percent. Methodologies aside, if 84 percent of any significant segment of your student body is dropping out, that's still pretty bad, a fact Pepicello acknowledges. It is also a less-than-ideal expenditure of federal tax dollars.

Just as there are high default rates on loans given to people with bad credit, Phoenix has high dropout rates (though compared to federally protected mortgage defaulters, Phoenix dropouts carry a modest amount of low-interest loan debt). By keeping admissions standards low, the university is opening up higher education not just to those who can't hack it but to others who can, and who might not have gotten in anywhere else. Phoenix takes the federal money, offers the courses, and considers the high failure rate a cost of doing business.

For-profit schools are not the only ones vulnerable to the distortions of federal education dollars. Nonprofits and state schools wallow in the stuff, too, including research grants and direct subsidies unavailable to Phoenix. What's more, many public schools make up their budget shortfalls not through charging their customers or synching up with employers (from whom Phoenix derives significant revenue) but from extra-academic fund raising, which can invite a whole world of curriculum-bending and attention-sapping distortions of its own. Breneman, a Phoenix critic, writes that he was nonetheless impressed with the comparative amount of time the school's deans spent on actual academic development: "As a dean in a public university, a substantial portion of my time is necessarily devoted to fund-raising and grant procurement. The ironies abound!"

Credentialing Mania
It's not just the people who own the campuses who spend time thinking about how to get their hands on more dough. Many students are in education for the money too. "University of Phoenix is, in some ways, exploiting this credentialing mania in our country," says the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, who has written extensively about the economics of education. "People want to have a jump on their colleagues—an MBA, an MPH. University of Phoenix is exploiting that desire to make a profit."

Many student customers just want a piece of paper with a credential that their employers will accept. Employers, especially those footing the students' bills, want that piece of paper to be legitimate, backed by a certain amount of achievement. Both want the service to be affordable. Shareholders of the Apollo Group want the whole transaction to produce profits.

Vedder is ultimately enthusiastic about the role that Phoenix and for-profit institutions play: "I think it's great that we have the University of Phoenix. I wish we had more [schools like it]. It's providing a great education service to a large number of Americans at no direct costs to the taxpayers, though I might add that indirectly it depends on government loan money."

Students who stick it out can earn their credentials from Phoenix with a maximum of flexibility and a minimum of fuss; that's why they enroll. This aspect may have attracted such disparate graduates as Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal.

But the typical student is considerably less flashy. Take 29-year-old Samantha Emrick, a lab tech at a hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, who liked her job but didn't see a future in it. Emrick had tried community college back in 2002 but found it was a scheduling nightmare. Evening offerings were so limited that she found herself skipping entire semesters because none of the classes she needed for her requirements were available at convenient times. "Just sitting out like that is really wasting time," she says. Unable to afford going back to school full time, Emrick saw a TV ad for the University of Phoenix's Axia College and decided to enroll.

Axia, a relatively new offering, is designed to speed people with little or no higher education through an associate's degree and prep them for a bachelor's. It's cheap: $7,084 a year, compared with an average tuition of $9,630 in other Phoenix programs and $23,712 at traditional private colleges (public universities average $6,185). "I support myself," Emrick says. She pays for her classes with the help of loans while continuing to work full time. Emrick is about six months into her associate's degree, with a focus in health care administration. She hopes to complete it in November 2008, then go directly into Phoenix's bachelor program. "It's helping me to prepare for being over people, management skills, writing memos, resumés, how to critique yourself," she says. "What I'm learning goes toward everyday life, too, not just professional life."

Faculty Fraud?
One of the thorniest issues that regulators and critics raise regarding the University of Phoenix is its reliance on part-time faculty. A full 95 percent of Phoenix instructors teach part time, compared to an average of 47 percent nationwide.

Phoenix's instructors describe themselves as "delivering" course material, since most of the classes are centrally crafted and standardized across teachers. Half of the class sessions are spent in "learning teams," where students work together without an instructor present. This makes Phoenix cheaper to run, since the school only pays an instructor for half of the course hours. President Pepicello calls the learning teams "integral" to the university's education model, but as Breneman notes, "A cynic might suggest that students have been known to shirk efforts that are not monitored."

In 2000 the university paid the federal government $6 million to settle a complaint from the Department of Education, which ruled that the school's class hours fell short of the minimum 12 hours per week of instructional time required for federal student aid eligibility. Phoenix upped its hours a little, and the 1992 amendment to the Higher Education Act that had instituted the 12-hour rule was allowed to expire in 2001, partly in recognition that standards for what counted as a "week" of classes were changing in the era of online education, work-study semesters, and other education innovations.

Mandating a class-hours percentage is a decidedly 20th-century approach in the age of the Internet. As the single biggest education-industry enthusiast for technological change, Phoenix is bearing the brunt of outdated expectations. Many students, says Phoenix writing and English teacher Carol Rzadkiewicz, switch from courses in person to courses online, sometimes mid-semester. "If you have that option, if you have that convenience," she says, "you don't have to drop out, like so many women in my situation did."

Rzadkiewicz is exactly the kind of nontraditional university participant that Phoenix was designed to attract. At age 16, she was a married and pregnant high school dropout who still maintained some vague literary ambitions. "I was young," she says. "I was in a hopeless situation, with no education, no training." Eventually she obtained a GED, took some classes at a community college, enrolled in the State University of West Georgia at age 44, got a divorce, and earned her master's degree online through a state school. Now she's a published short story writer who has been teaching at Phoenix since 2003, often telling her story to incoming students as an example of what's possible in the modern world. "Had there been something like University of Phoenix, especially the online aspect, that would have made a big difference in my decisions," she says. "I might have done what I did a lot sooner."

Phoenix's reliance on part-time faculty such as Rzadkiewicz prevents the university from winning accreditation from the top credentialing institutions. Though many of the components of the school are regionally accredited, the university's business school is ineligible for the gold standard of business schools, accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, largely because of the part-time faculty issue.

But the truth is, Phoenix made the tradeoff between efficiency and accreditation a long time ago. The school has never applied for accreditation for its MBA program, because it's not eligible. It doesn't provide the same education as Kellogg or Wharton, and it doesn't even have some of the basic facilities of community colleges.

Pepicello is more concerned about the university's relationships with "more than 1,000 employers across the country," most of whom pay student tuition. "That's an indicator that employers see the value of what we're doing," he says. When employers withdraw a tuition benefit—as Intel did in 2006, citing lack of top-level accreditation—"we take that very seriously, because they are our customers too."

‘The Nation Is the Better for It'
In the coming decades, says economist Vedder, for-profit and nonprofit models for higher education will compete directly with each other for customers. For-profit schools have saturated the adult education market, so more and more commercial institutions will be thinking about turning their attention toward younger students. The pool of 18-to-21-year-olds has been expanding for many years, as the children of baby boomers reach college age, but that growth has begun to slow and is expected to reverse itself three or four years from now. "When the for-profits continue to grow," Vedder argues, "that is going to have some noticeable enrollment effects" on traditional colleges.

This isn't a problem for elite schools, which maintain their status by turning away as many potential customers as possible. But mid- and bottom-tier schools offering cheaper versions of the traditional four-year bachelor's degree may have something to worry about. As more and more people realize that their college degree doesn't come with a $1 million check, they're going to look for ways to minimize the huge opportunity cost of attending a traditional four-year college. One way is to work full time while attending school.

Until recently, Phoenix didn't consider applications from anyone younger than 23. That minimum age requirement was dropped to 21 in 2004, and now 18-year-olds are allowed to enroll in some programs. Other for-profit educational institutions are also getting more aggressive. A group of former Phoenix employees, organized as Bridgeport Education, recently started buying small, failing nonprofit schools and turning them into for-profit campuses on a tweaked version of the Phoenix model. This approach solves several problems at once, including accreditation, since the existing schools were already accredited when purchased.

Vedder argues that "for-profit education is part of the solution to America's higher education problems, not the problem itself." And even Phoenix critic Breneman has said, "Where UOP does compete with traditional institutions, competition will generally be beneficial to students and there is no reason to decry that outcome. On balance, the education of working adults has been strengthened and improved by the existence of UOP, and the nation is the better for it."

Phoenix students know they're not getting the best education money can buy. But they might be getting the best education their money can buy.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor at Reason.

(This is a corrected version of a story printed in the July 2008 issue of reason. The job title of University of Phoenix President Bill Pepicello was in error, as was the terminology used to describe the university's defeat in a January 2008 civil trial.)

Tomato Triage

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I love the farmers' market. A victim of my own post-yuppie childless female demographic, I can't help but cherish a vision of myself in a summer dress, basket tucked in the crook of my elbow, sashaying between stalls of heirloom tomatoes, wildflowers, and artisanal pork products. In this fantasy it is 7:30 on a brilliantly sunny Sunday morning, and all the grizzled farmers and jolly butchers know me by name.

This is, of course, an absurd delusion. What really happens most weeks is that I sleep in, then pick up a shrink-wrapped bundle of green beans and an equally shrink-wrapped Tyson chicken at the Safeway.

While I weep for the lost aesthetic experience, I'm not worried about endangering my own virtue, my health, or the health of the planet if I'm a little hung over from Saturday night's festivities or if it happens to be raining when I wake up. Because there simply isn't anything like conclusive evidence that shopping at the farmers' market will save me (or the environment) from such heartaches.

I'm sure you've heard: Killer tomatoes are attacking America as we speak. The New York Times editorialized that we "should not have to wait until the next food scare before Washington comes to the rescue." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is doggedly eliminating possible culprits state by state. But not all tomatoes are equally terrifying, the FDA has been careful to point out. Cherry or grape tomatoes are fine, as are homegrown tomatoes.

This last bit has the "eat local" crowd crowing. Locavore (word of the year 2007!) logic goes like this: Those big factory farms are awash in God knows what kind of creepy-crawlies. Tomatoes are picked in one place, washed in another, packed elsewhere, and shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles. Of course they're going to get dirty! Far better, say the locavores, to eat food that is grown within a small radius, say 100 miles of your home. Buy at farms and farmers markets. Get to know your local producers and only shop with the ones you trust. Grow your own! An appealing prospect, to be sure. But the gap between homegrown and farmer's market may be larger than the gap between farmer's market and supermarket.

"As a scientist, I cannot say smaller is better. It's just not that simple," Martha Robert, a microbiologist at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and a safety adviser to the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, told Newsweek. "The large packers we have are extremely stringent with sanitizing techniques and measures to prevent cross-contamination, but if someone makes a mistake when they're mixing or dicing large quantities, the problem is going to be larger too," she explains. "But sometimes a small grower has been doing something for years, and [they] don't know they're putting themselves at risk."

Put another way, anyone who has ever been in one of New York's independent corner greengrocers, or an unaffiliated rural grocery store knows that small and local are no guarantee of higher hygiene standards. Some big operations are squeaky clean, others breed disease. Likewise with the little guys. As I write, the feds are fingering a couple of growers and maybe a restaurant chain as the culprits after clearing thousands of tomato producers.

Small can be beautiful, but it's no guarantee of better hygiene or virtue. Accidents happen. Sometimes pigs shit in inconvenient places or someone fails to wash his hands on little farms, too.

Because advocates of local eating conflate health and environmental issues on a regular basis, allow me to briefly do so as well. Much of the warm glow of farmers' market virtue comes from a growing concern about something called "food miles"—when a box of grape tomatoes has to travel hundreds of miles to get to your plate, surely the number of carbon-belching, petroleum-powered vehicles involved becomes unacceptable. So even if you still might end up calling Ralph on the big white phone thanks to some tainted tomatoes, at least you'll be able to tell him you weren't contributing to global warming, right?

Just in time for summer, a new study finds a serious hole in the food miles concept: In terms of total carbon output, what you eat matters a lot more than where it came from. Swapping out chicken for red meat every now and then can eliminate just as much carbon as eating entirely local. Going further still, several studies have come up with variations on this somewhat counterintuitive conclusion: shipping spring lamb on the slow boat from New Zealand may actually produce less carbon than hopping in the minivan for a family trip to pick up some locally-raised lamb shanks from the farmer outside of town, or a drive to the farmers' market.

Because I'm a late sleeper, I often manage to emerge, unshowered and basketless, just as they're shutting down the farmers' market in my neighborhood. The site is no longer a magical, vegetable version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. It's just a parking lot with a burst glass container of fresh-from-the-cow (potentially unpasteurized) milk, a Port-a-Potty in the corner, and nowhere to wash your hands. The snarl of shoppers' cars and farmers' old diesel trucks that chokes the neighborhood on market days is just clearing up. The farmers' market is marvelous enough without all the trappings—while I'm sad that once again this week I won't befriend a jolly butcher, I remain unconcerned about my gastronomic virtue or the relative threats to my guts.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Olympic Gag Order

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Prince Charles once referred to China’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks,” but the British Olympic Committee seems to find them intimidating enough.

“British athletes will have to sign a contract promising not to comment on any politically sensitive issues” during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, British Olympics Association spokesman Graham Nathan told CNN in February. They will be presented with the contract as soon as they qualify in Olympic trials, and athletes who violate the gag order by discussing, say, China’s dismal human rights record can be barred from competition and put on the next plane home.

Officials say they are merely trying to comply with Section 51 of the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” But critics note troubling parallels between this contract and a low point in British sporting history: The British soccer team, at the prodding of the British Foreign Office, lined up for a Nazi salute in the Berlin Olympic stadium before a friendly game with Germany in 1938.

China is hustling to put on its best face for the Olympic games in August, much as Germany did when it hosted the games shortly before World War II. While public persecution may be brought to a halt, dissidents such as the human rights campaigner Hu Jia are quietly being put under house arrest or otherwise taken out of circulation.

Many countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, have promised not to restrict their athletes’ political speech about China in the run-up to the games. In Britain, a public outcry has produced promises to “review” the U.K.’s policy, so the Brits may yet fall in line with their Anglosphere cousins.

Tax Revolt in Tea Party Zone

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Massachusetts must have been a terrifying place in 1995. A relatively recent arrival in the commonwealth myself, I had no idea that the mid-90s was a time when health care was unobtainable. I didn't know about the washed out bridges and unplowed roads. Nor do I recall seeing bands of feral children roaming the streets from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm due to the lack of public schools.

But a popular ballot initiative to eliminate Massachusetts's income tax—thus bringing the state budget back to 1995 levels—is being greeted with howls of protest and predictions that the state will degenerate into underfunded chaos.

Gov. Deval Patrick sees trouble ahead should the flow of income tax revenue be dammed up: "Just as it is the people's money it is also the people's bridges and the people's roads and the people's schools and the people's broken neighbors, in some cases."

Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray says she understands that people would like to have their money back—the average taxpayers would pay about $3,600 less in taxes—"but when their child has no school to go to and they can't get out their door to go to work because the street hasn't been plowed in the winter, I think the public would be back here really quick saying, 'Please, fix this.'"

New Hampshire, Texas, and Florida are doing fine without an income tax, but the Bay State (or Taxachusetts, as its citizens fondly call it) has a current rate of 5.3 percent on income.

The initiative is brutally simple: A 50 percent decrease in the income tax rate effective January 1, 2009, and the rest abolished one year later. That takes the state from its current revenues of about $28 billion down to the $17 billion it had in 1995.

The initiative process has three phases. Last fall, the Committee for Small Government gathered 100,000 signatures, well in excess of the 66,593 needed to push the initiative forward. Then there's a period where legislators can go ahead and pass the proposed law, thus skipping the balloting process. Needless to say, they didn't opt for that. Now the group must gather another 11,099 signatures and they'll be on the ballot.

"People think of us as a liberal state, but we're pretty good at [anti-tax] ballot initiatives," says Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation, a group that's been fighting taxes in Massachusetts since the 1970s. In 2000, her group used the ballot to win a rollback of a "temporary" tax increase still in effect from 1989. The tax rate was supposed to gradually decrease until it hit 5 percent. In Massachusetts, however, ballot initiatives are just for statues, not constitutional amendments (as they are, for example, in California). This means that the legislature can override them, which is exactly what happened. Lawmakers froze the rollback in 2002 at 5.3 percent.

This means that there is a chance the legislature could simply repeal the income tax elimination initiative as well. Given the popular support for the initiative, however, Anderson wonders if legislators might be feeling cautious. "If a few of them lose their jobs in November, I don't think the others are going to want to come back in and repeal right away."

In 2002, the Committee for Small Government snagged 45 percent of the vote with a similar initiative. "We found we could get a good respectable vote," says committee chair Carla Howell. The effort got almost no coverage, and every single one of the few editorial pages that took notice of the proposal opposed it, says Howell.

This time around, people are taking notice, in part thanks to a big campaign gearing up against the initiative. A far-from-ragtag crew of union members and city and town employees groups have brought in a hired gun in the form of former Blue Cross Blue Shield executive and civic leader Peter Meade to lead their Coalition for Our Communities. Howell is pleased to see the big guns arrayed against her. "The more they advertise, the more they will be helping us out. We don't need to sell our side. Our biggest challenge is just making sure that every voter in the state knows about it."

Howell also rejects concerns that the measure is too radical: "To be increasing the price of government continually where people in the private sector are dealing with wage freezes and job losses, that's radical!" Anderson echoes the sentiment: "It doesn't matter if you phase it in over 14 months, or 5 years, or 10 years, you're going to get the same rhetoric," she says, "It's the end of the world!" Might as well go whole hog.

Plucky though these small government campaigners may be, it's unlikely that Massachusetts lawmakers will actually stand by while $11 billion slips through their clammy fingers. Instead, they'll increase sales taxes, luxury taxes, and other fees. In fact, they probably won't even let the income tax phase out all the way. But having these kinds of fights in the past has at least staved off more increases, which would be better than nothing.

A statewide survey in April by polling firm Fabrizo McLaughlin found that Massachusetts voters think their government wastes about 41 cents [PDF] for every dollar of revenue. Elimination of the state income tax would reduce the state's budget by about 40 percent. As the kids used to say in the '90s: Coincidence? I think not.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Free Ride

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:55:00 EDT

If all goes well, thrifty Vermonters will soon have a new way to save a few bucks. All they have to do is hand over their hearts, kidneys, and corneas.

State Reps. James Fitzgerald (D–St. Albans) and Francis McFaun (R–Barre Town) have introduced a bill offering to wave the driver’s license renewal fees of Vermont residents who become organ donors, a system similar to one that has already been tested in Georgia. Nearly 100,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, but Vermont currently provides a measly four or five dozen organs a year from a pool of about half a million licensed drivers.

Despite the staggering statistics about the miles of maple syrup–soaked intestines going to waste in the Green Mountain State, even this small incentive has proved controversial. Financial compensation for organ donation is prohibited by federal law, with opponents of organ markets arguing, in the words of the Harvard surgeon Francis Delmonico, that “payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual.” Some Vermont bloggers have extended this argument to Fitzgerald and McFaun’s proposal, arguing that a driver’s license is a “necessary document” and that waving the $40 fee in exchange for an organ donation pledge puts “inappropriate pressure” on low-income drivers.

The University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who has found that even small organ donation incentives can be powerful, writes that “monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets.” Nearly all economists agree. In recent years, major arbiters of medical ethics have softened their stance on compensation, with the American Medical Association, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, and the United Network for Organ Sharing supporting some compensation experiments.

Pirate Capitalism

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason, New York: Free Press, 279 pages, $25

In a well-publicized speech two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said, “We understand now that piracy is a business model.… Pirates compete the same way we do —through quality, price, and availability.”

Sweeney wasn’t thinking about Jack Sparrow, the fictional hero of Disney’s cash cow Pirates of the Caribbean. She meant the consumers and capitalists who pull music, words, and video out of the culture and remix, recast, and resell them.

It used to be easy to tell the pirates from the creators. Record labels sold CDs; Napster distributed music for free. Studios made movies; bootleggers taped opening nights in theaters and sold DVDs on the street the next morning. But postmodern piracy is more than mere bootlegging. In its best manifestation, it is the creation of brand new products cobbled together from the sights and sounds of contemporary life—including those sights and sounds disseminated by billion-dollar entertainment corporations.

In order to keep up with the pirates, more and more media companies have started to copy and co-opt their tactics. They’ve done this so well and so thoroughly that it’s getting hard to tell where piracy ends and good marketing begins. These increasingly blurry lines are making the entertainment industry nervous and conflicted. In The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, Matt Mason of Vice magazine tells the stories of early mix-tape mavens, turf-protecting graffiti artists, and retro sneaker designers while analyzing the ways that big companies compete with, fight off, and (increasingly) embrace culture pirates.

Mason concentrates on edgier industries, but we need look no further than Disney’s multi-billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for a prime example of a decades-long saga of a major corporation first plagiarizing itself and then encouraging others to do the same.

It began in the late 1950s, when someone at Disneyland dreamed up a wax museum of history’s great pirates, sort of a seafaring Madame Tussaud’s. After the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the herky-jerky robot motions and pre-recorded audio of “animatronics” became all the rage. Disneyland’s wax-pirate exhibit slowly evolved into a creepy, scary, kitschy wonder: a shadowy boat ride through larger-than-life animated pirates going about their dirty business.

After a few decades of mooring itself into the subconscious minds of American children—who among us didn’t duck when the fake cannonballs whistled by?—the Pirates of the Caribbean resurfaced in the early 1990s as a screenplay pitch from Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, whose previous projects included Aladdin and Shrek, paradigmatic specimens of the self-aware, self-referential, pop-literate era of animated features.

In 2003, Disney finally turned the adaptation of the theme-park ride into celluloid. The rest is history: Swaggery drunk Johnny Depp (in a character openly lifted from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards) spawned a trilogy of films, the second of which made an astonishing $1,066,179,725 in worldwide box office. Halloween costumes abounded, some Disney-issued and some not. Some were simply labeled “pirate” but looked a lot like Sparrow/Richards.

At least eight video games inspired by the film have appeared, with varying degrees of official sanction. A mobile phone game released by Disney’s Internet unit received lackluster reviews while a popular, unauthorized Xbox game borrowed the title, The Black Pearl, and little else. But instead of suing the peglegs off their unauthorized competitors, Disney simply pulled alongside and joined the melee with its own (free) Pirates of the Caribbean online role-playing game, fighting it out on the pirates’ own terms. Disney has stopped seeing at least some of the world’s pirates and remixers as thieves, and started seeing them as opportunities for a vast, multi-faceted marketing campaign.

Using the customizable characters from the role-playing game, fans were soon creating original YouTube videos—digital clips of pirates skewering British officers on their cutlasses, for example—from within the world of Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Some of the best were made by the 10,000 fans given passwords for the beta test of the online game at a pre-screening of the third movie, making them officially sanctioned pirate remixers (many of whom take their role literally, showing up to the screening in eye patches and tricorns).

Lots of these fan-fiction films have developed narratives of their own. They are part of a growing movement of machinima, where fans use video game environments to create their own animated movies, many of them borrowing characters or settings from Hollywood blockbusters. Meanwhile, the unauthorized Xbox game has in turn become the basis for 14 (and counting) user-modified versions at the PiratesAhoy.com online community.

In 2006, completing the great circle of recycling, Disneyland altered the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride to include an animatronic Johnny Depp.

In an effort to explain this mash-up landscape, Mason turns, with mixed success, to the last days of disco, to the early days of tagging New York subway cars, and to economic game theory. The most apt parallel, though, is to an industry known for its fickleness. Video and music companies are slowly realizing something that the world of fashion—with its markedly more relaxed attitude toward intellectual property—has always known. In the words of Coco Chanel, who long ruled the fashion world with an iron fist and a quilted handbag, “a fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.”

In a 2006 Virginia Law Review article, “The Piracy Paradox,” Kal Raustiala and Chris Springman made the case that “induced obsolescence” is the fashion industry’s healthy way of shrugging off the impact of copying while still remaining relevant. Logos can be protected —via trademark law, not copyright—but there’s nothing illegal about selling a purple head-scarf that looks a lot like the purple headscarf in Ralph Lauren’s last collection. Ralph simply announces that eyepatches are all the rage now and purple headscarves are so last season. This keeps fashion fresh and the industry strong, all with very weak intellectual property protection. As Coco said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

This isn’t to say that all designers sit idly by while $30 versions of $5,000 purses show up on the street. The Paris-based Hermès in particular has been aggressive about protecting its logos and certain additional trademarkable design elements. Still, the relationship between Chinese knock-offs and couture may be mutually beneficial in the end.

“We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward,” Disney’s Sweeney said in her speech. Mason puts it another way, using awfully similar language: “Pirates have taken over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead, they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.

Homesteading on the High Seas

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:58:00 EDT

If Peter Thiel funds something, it's bound to be cutting-edge awesome.

He is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which seeks to slow, stop, and eventually reverse aging. He was a producer of the film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's charmingly ambiguous novel about a pro-tobacco lobbyist. An early investor in social networking, he was involved with Linked In and was the first investor in Facebook. He's big at the Singularity Institute (reason's Ronald Bailey caught up with him at the Singularity Summit earlier this year, check out the interview in the May print edition), which ponders and pushes artificial intelligence in preparation for a Vernor Vingeian "intelligence explosion." His first success was PayPal, which he originally hoped "would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency, something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore data haven free from government control."

And last week, Thiel announced a $500,000 investment—the same amount he put into Facebook in June 2004—in the Seasteading Institute. Seasteading, or "homesteading on the high seas," is an idea that has long attracted libertarians and others who would like to see a little more competition between forms of government. The idea is to get out into international waters and set up a floating outpost (or 12, or 1,200) from which people can come and go, experimenting with different types of legal, social, and contractual arrangements.

Thiel's co-conspirator and resident big thinker is none other than the impeccably credentialed Patri Friedman, son of David "Machinery of Freedom" Friedman, grandson of Milton "Capitalism and Freedom" Friedman. Patri, 31, has been beating the drums for various floating autonomous entities for several years, whenever he can steal time from his work as a software engineer at Google and from his now 2-year-old son, Tovar.

Despite the seemingly radical idea he's championing, Patri sees himself as a practical guy: "Starting a new country is actually a much less hard problem than, say, a libertarian winning a U.S. election," he says. He says that most of his competitors in the libertarian/anarchist autonomous entity business have been too ambitious, citing efforts from Sealand (the abandoned offshore fort-turned-free-state "which sort of worked" until it was devastated by fire in 2006) to more dramatic failures like Freedom Ship (current estimated cost >$11 billion, construction not yet begun) and the Aquarius phase of the Millennial Project ("colonizing the galaxy in eight easy steps!") to Minerva Reef (an uninhabited dredged island "invaded" by neighboring Tonga and eventually more or less reclaimed by the sea).

Learning a valuable lesson from his predecessors, Friedman is an incrementalist. "I want to talk about what to do this year, not how to colonize the galaxy." One way to start small, he says, is to hold a kind of floating Burning Man, called Ephemerisle, an idea inspired by childhood pilgrimages with his father to Pennsic, a Society for Creative Anachronism medieval reenactment held outside Pittsburgh, and college stints at Burning Man.

"There aren't that many people who are wiling to drop their lives and move to the ocean." Instead, he says, "it could start as a one week vacation, but then unlike Burning Man it could grow and eventually become permanent." Friedman hopes to hold the first Ephemerisle next summer, inviting many types of floating vessels to join him in international waters. Even an ordinary cruise ship might be enough to get started, since the cruise industry has proven that "providing power, water, food, and internet on the ocean is not only possible but can be profitable." But some of Thiel's grant is going toward figuring out the best way to throw up some small, cheap seasteads to provide a little non-state infrastructure and get things rolling (or floating, as the case may be).

From the official website: "Think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues—freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens."

Thiel and Friedman met at a dinner set up by a couple of guys who work for Thiel's investment firm, Clarium Capital, and happened to be fans of Friedman's blog. Ajay Royan, a principal at Clarion and now a board member at the Seasteading Institute, described how the meeting of minds between Friedman and Thiel came about a few months back: "Peter knows Patri's grandfather, so we were just tickled that somebody of that lineage was so close to us physically and was thinking about macro issues from that perspective," says Royan. "We'd been having a lot internal debate [at Clarium] about how we get a freer space for people to function in. What was intriguing to us was that here was somebody proposing to shift the canvas to a relatively neutral space by recreating a frontier."

Not content with revolutionizing technology and society, Thiel says he's looking to bring "innovation to the public sector, where it's vitally needed." As with PayPal, his aspirations for the project are far from modest: "We're at a fascinating juncture: the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level."

Having a low-cost, gradually ramping up cluster of choices to live on would lower the cost of "jurisdictional arbitrage," which is very high right now, says Friedman. If you don't like your government right now, the only way to get a new one is to sell your house, pack up, move to another country, deal with immigration, get a new job and a new house, make new friends, and learn a new culture. This is expensive. But hopping from boat to boat, platform to platform, or island to island is cheap.

In fact, Friedman sees seasteading as a real, viable version of a metaphor his dad once used to sell anarcho-capitalism, and demonstrate why Nozickian utopias with lots of free entry and exit will tend toward libertarianism rather than authoritarianism:

Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language. One day, the president of France announces that because of troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents.

The question is (to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes): Will three generations of Friedmans be enough? Patri Friedman is optimistic. "I hope I can create a world where [my son] doesn't need to worry about how to increase freedom because we've already got it." he says. "But I suspect that I'll still be working on it by the time he's old enough to help."

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor

Arnold Among the Lilliputians

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

It was the perfect day for a conference on climate change at Yale University last Friday. In New Haven, Connecticut, the crocuses were peeking out from the soil. A group of state governors emerged from their winter stupor and milled around on unsteady feet, climbing in and out of zero-emission busses. A couple of Canadian legislators were present, perhaps stopping over on their return migration to the north. Ah, spring.

"I would not recommend that you have a public relations campaign on global warming in January and February in Manitoba," said Manitoba Premier Gary Doer. Ne'er have truer words been spoken.

The governors were in town to sign the Governors' Declaration on Climate Change—a soft and fuzzy document "recognizing new threats" and "recommitting to the effort to stop global warming"—but pretty much everyone else was just there to see Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, delegate from the land of perpetual sun, California.

In the morning sessions, the participants uttered the usual soundbites. The governors cheerfully rejected any suggestion that government-mandated reductions in carbon output might have economic costs. Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J) got a round of applause for saying that higher prices on energy and restrictions on use would be "an economic opportunity, not an economic burden." Gov. Jodi Rell (R-Conn.) crowed about "green collar jobs."

But a surprising new message was on display as well: States' right are back in fashion, and this time it's liberals singing the praises of federalism.

"States' rights, particularly in the last century, were regarded as the most regressive kind of policies," said Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kansas). "The federal government would set a high bar on civil rights, or safety net issues. And states' rights was going to drag that back, to claim the opportunity to have a lower bar at the states. I want to suggest that in the 21st century this has been flipped." She expanded on that theme in an interview: "When I was young, states' rights was a pejorative term. But the federal government has been very laissez-faire in all sort of areas, so states are stepping up to fill the void." Gov. Corzine noted "a vacuum in Washington with regard to leadership on the issue of climate change," and apparently New Jersey, like nature, abhors a vacuum, since Corzine has been on the forefront of state-based carbon regulation.

Currently, 18 states have signed the Governors' Climate Change Declaration, but 36 states have enacted some kind of greenhouse-gas plan.

Why hundreds of Yalies crowded into a poorly ventilated auditorium on the first really warm, beautiful day of spring became clear when Schwarzenegger swept in at the last moment for a signing ceremony and a speech. He looked sleek in a green tie and a flawlessly uniform tan.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was the only one of the governors to acknowledge that states will have to make tradeoffs, mostly economic, if they are serious about reducing carbon emissions.

The biggest applause line of the day came when the seven-time Mr. Olympia turned the tables on political conventional wisdom about who is hurting the environment and who is helping. "It's not always Republicans" or big corporations, he said, that slow environmental progress. Several companies want to build solar power plants in the Mojave Desert. However, the place where they want to build may be the kind of territory that a particular kind of endangered squirrel would prefer to frequent. Efforts by the California Department of Fish and Game ("my own agency, that I'm supposed to be the head of and the boss of!") to protect "this little creature" have thwarted plans to build planet-saving solar arrays. "If we can't put a solar power plant in the Mojave Desert," Schwarzenegger thundered, "I don't know where the hell we can put it!"

Schwarzenegger has also pushed back, with lawsuits and a P.R. campaign, against the strongly worded suggestion from the Environmental Protection Agency that states are forbidden to go beyond federal standards for carbon emissions and set stricter standards of their own.

Of course, with his global fame and private jet, Schwarzenegger has taken advantage of this new states' rights doctrine more than most. Article 10 of the Constitution states that "no State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation," and also looks down on states that "enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power." But between rallying governors for carbon limits and hobnobbing with Kyoto protocol signatories, Schwarzenegger has probably already breached that dam when it comes to environmental issues. Last October, for instance, California and a coalition of European Union countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Norway, and New Zealand formed the world's first International Carbon Action Partnership.

One of Schwarzenegger's applause lines: "We don't wait for Washington, because I've always said Washington is asleep at the wheel." This newfound pride in federalism has its definite limits. For every states' rights rah rah, there was a wistful plea for more federal regulation on carbon production. Even states' rights revisionist Gov. Sebelius said she hoped that "the roles will be reversed in the next administration." A proposed cap and trade plan, Gov. Jon Corzine said, is something he'd "love to see globally, love to see nationally, but unfortunately narrowed to regional efforts."

All of the governors present, including Schwarzenegger, agreed that no matter who took office in January, he or she would be "better on the global warming" than the Bush administration—meaning that some sort of national cap and trade or carbon tax was almost inevitable, whether under President McCain, President Obama, or President Clinton, and stricter federal regulations would again become the gold standard of environmental controls.

Even in this moment of states' rights redemption, the newly empowered governors restated their longing to return to the old way, when their marching orders come from Washington. This is understandable, since a uniform national policy will be easier on companies that do business in more than one state, and will send a clearer message to other countries about the United States' position on the issue. Plus, governors won't have to take the blame when their constituents object to higher prices at the pump, at the register, and at the car dealership.

Still, it is a little sad to see that even the Governator would cede power to Washington so gladly. In the meantime, he's making his own dubiously constitutional way in the enviromental future, winning the hearts and minds of Yalies, and making the other governors seem like girlie men.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Too Good to Be Legal

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:00:00 EST

The Recording Industry Association of America has a warning for music fans: If an album seems too good to be legal, it probably is.

In a “video news release” sent to television stations shortly before Christmas, the trade group warns: “Watch for compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan.” The video, which many stations aired as though it were a normal news report, makes a number of dubious claims. It asserts, for example, that the “audio quality on pirated CDs is usually atrocious.”

But the most striking aspect of the “report” is the implicit admission that the legitimate industry does not produce the compilations consumers find most enticing, leaving that niche to the pirates. The video release advises people to employ “cool, innovative ways to get your favorite music,” such as iTunes, or just to buy an artist’s entire CD even if they want only one or two songs from it.

Artifact: Playing Tag

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In January the Library of Congress posted 3,100 public-domain images on the commercial photo-sharing website Flickr. After 208 years of keeping the privilege for itself, the library is finally letting the rest of America in on the fun of categorizing its sprawling collection.

Historically, archivists have kept delicate photo prints locked away in temperature-controlled rooms, indexed under a few inadequate terms. (In the case of this photo: “surplus commodities,” “food relief,” and “United States—Arizona—Saint Johns.”) The search system for images was little better than the index card file the man is rifling through in the snapshot. Even after the photos were scanned and digitized, researchers still had to page through hundreds of poorly labeled pictures.

Letting everyone generate tags means more people can find what they’re looking for, and faster. After just one week online, the first tranche of photos generated millions of page views and thousands of comments and tags, ranging from “abandoned car” to “zeppelin.”

Eventually anyone will be able to find this photo by searching “America at war,” “poverty,” “fruit,” “pine boxes,” “index cards,” “1940s hats,” and dozens of other terms, in any combination. The Library of Congress has made this slice of its 14-million-photo archive infinitely more valuable just by letting the public play with it.

Worshipping at the Voting Booth

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

If Florida had a Homeric epithet (think Hector, tamer of horses) it would be "Florida, wrecker of elections." To Hades with "the Sunshine State."

This winter, the Florida Democratic party moved their primary up to a week before Super Tuesday, eager for the nation to watch its pilgrimage to the voting booth with bated breath once again. The national party warned that there would be consequences for states that jumped the line, and lo and behold: The Florida Democrats were stripped of their convention delegates.

And now, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scratching each others' eyes out all the way to the finish line, Florida, wrecker of elections—along with Michigan, builder of iron horses—could well be the decider.

Of the denuded delegates, 210 of them in Florida and 156 in Michigan, Clinton said yesterday in Detroit, "This goes way beyond this election and it goes way beyond who's running, because no matter where you were born or how much money you were born into, no matter where you worship or the color of your skin, it is a bedrock American principle that we are all equal in the voting booth."

Americans have long manifested a near-worshipful attitude toward voting—"I Voted!" stickers serving in the place of a smudge or ashes on the forehead or a yarmulke. But of course, Clinton isn't talking about principle: It's politics in the purest possible form. Voting always is. (The bit about skin color and trust funds is a red herring.) Clinton wants those votes to count because they'd be hers—she won Florida with a little more than 50 percent to Obama's 33 percent, and Michigan with 55 percent of the vote (Obama wasn't on the ballot). Obama's lawyers are concerned about possible revotes, which they dubbed "unprecedented in conception and proposed structure." He didn't win those states the first time around, and they'd rather not rock the boat with Obama leading by about 100 delegates at the moment. That's a margin of safety he stands to lose if the rebellious states are counted or recounted.

With speculation about a possible do-over in the air, the Florida state party took the question to the people: Do you want to vote again? "The consensus is clear," wrote Rep. Karen L. Thurman, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, in an email to Florida Democrats. "Florida doesn't want to vote again. So we won't." After years of voting out of a sense of duty, honor, righteousness, Floridians have cottoned on to electoral cause-and-effect: Every time someone pokes a hole in a butterfly ballot or fingers a touchscreen in the Florida peninsula, something goes horribly wrong.

(Michigan, nowhere near as chastened, has a June 3 statewide redo of the open primary in the works, though exact procedures and who will foot the bill are unclear.)

Who can blame Florida for wanting to opt out? The ancient Greeks believed that failure to sacrifice an ox or horse to Poseidon, god of the sea, brought shipwreck, earthquakes, and bad fishing. Failure of Floridians to vote correctly seems to bring a similar plague on our ship of state. Worse than a trident-wielding god of the sea, they brought out blogging Michael Moore, who thundered that the 2000 vote mess in Florida was the culmination of Kristallnacht.

The Greek gods bore grudges and played politics incessantly, often conducting their personal vendettas by picking sides in the human battles on the plains of Troy. They demanded sacrifices because they enjoyed the smell of roasted meats burned in homage—an act that made mortal feel important, holy even—but only let such gestures influence outcomes on the margins.

"Generations of brave men and women marched and protested, risked and gave their lives for this right and it is because of them that Sen. Obama I stand before you as candidates for the Democratic nomination," Hillary Clinton said in Detroit, sounding downright Olympian in her pleasure at the sacrifices made on her behalf.

Florida and Michigan are battlegrounds, not for principle, but for pride and victory. Politicians will be politicians, but Florida's voters have graciously bowed out, turning down the chance to indulge in the sacred rite of voting twice in the same contest. For that, one can almost forgive them the havoc they've caused.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of reason.

From Ridiculous to Revolutionary

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:30:00 EST

"Nothing says ‘police state' like detaining kids for eating ice cream."

This is the best line in Internet guru Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, and he knows it. He wisely recycles it for an appreciative crowd on Thursday, the day of the book's release, at a talk sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He's talking about flashmobs in Belarus, which we'll get back to later. But let's begin at the beginning.

Email is the granddaddy of seemingly frivolous Internet applications. "It was an afterthought on the original internet. It was not part of what they sold to ARPA," says Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an Internet consultant for Nokia, BBC, Lego, and the U.S. Navy. Email was just a simplified file-sharing program. But within 3 months, email was 70 percent of traffic on the fledgling Internet.

It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people—there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.

Of course, everyone professes to hate the Reply All button and periodically swears bloody vengeance on its abusers. But the Reply All button offers us the power to turn a communication into a conversation (and sometimes even a community) with virtually no effort at all. No coordinating meetings or teleconferences, no need for synchronicity (anyone can read their email at any time and still be a part of the group), and no duplication.

"For the first time in human history," says Shirky, "our communications tools support group conversation and group action." Governments, ancient and enormous institutions like the Catholic Church, and massive corporations used to thoroughly dominate the landscape because only they could afford the high costs of coordination of large numbers of people. But now, for the first time, coordination (like talk) is cheap.

Consider the case of Gnarlykitty. She's a college student in Bangkok who mostly blogs about her new cell phone or posts pictures of her friends at clubs. But when Thailand found itself mid-coup in 2006 with major media outlets heavily restricted, she posted a bunch of photos and some of her thoughts on what was happening.

She became a minor celeb, posting to Wikipedia—which was aggregating news about the coup—and blogging summaries of events intermingled with tidbits like this one:

Long lost friend asked on MSN: "Hey Kitty how are ya??"
Me: "Great! Country is breaking but great!"

When things calmed down, she wrote: "OK I'm giving it a rest. I live blogged because all the news channels were cut off and all the websites were blocked. Now all major newssites and channels are up and running, my job is done. Besides, school back to normal tomorrow so I need to get back to my work." And that was that. The next day she posted about shoes: a "new pair of Nine West wedges" to be exact.

"She wasn't a full-time journalist," writes Shirky, "she was a citizen with a camera and a weblog, but she had participated in a matter of global significance at exactly the time when the traditional media were being silenced." The government closed down old coordinating institutions like media and activist groups, but was powerless to stop non-institutional actors.

Let's now return to the Belarussian ice cream eaters (Gnarlykitty would want us to).

They were a flashmob, of course. Flashmobs started out as a critique of hipster culture. Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper's, started sending out messages (as "Bill from New York") to large groups, suggesting that they do things like make bird noises on a ledge in Central Park. He intended it as a kind of elaborate thumb in the eye of hipster conformism. Others caught on, perhaps omitting the irony, and did things like staging a silent rave in Victoria Station. The New York Times runs a smug story on how flashmobbers "have nothing better to do" with their time. And, as the cliché goes, once The New York Times has heard of a trend, it must be so over, right?

But then, suddenly, flashmobs found their true calling: On a blog in Belarus, someone proposes a flashmob. The plan is to get together in October Square—the preferred site for political action, and a place where concerted action is banned—and eat ice cream.

Black clad secret police appear and drag dairyphilic kids bodily out of the square. "The problem with a group eating ice cream wasn't the ice cream, it was the group," says Shirky. "Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is the last great Eastern European dictator [but] the Lukshenko government can't penetrate the conspiracy, right? The whole thing is being done on the web. And they can't stop the group from entering October Square because they're not a group when they enter October Square."

Photos went up online almost immediately. The thinking was that it's tough to be really consistently oppressive and brutal when the world is watching. (Shirky: "The bug in the system is that the West cares quite a bit less about Eastern European dictatorship than it used to.")

Twitter is another example of the ridiculous quickly turning to the sublime. Morons who can't choose one bar and stay there on Friday nights want their friends to be able find them. Voila, a service that sends out badly spelled messages about your whereabouts to everyone you know. A few short months later, Egyptian democracy activists are using the same tool to organize and communicate below the radar and/or while in jail.

From frivolous to political is well-documented, but where does the market fit in? Shirky mentions another collaborative project, a tool to coordinate teams of people to subtitle Japanese animation called Aegisub. "It ended up signaling the high demand for stuff that American distributors thought was too arcane," says Shirky. As official releases of anime other than Sailor Moon became more common, the Aegisub community decided to delete their bootleg versions.

Why did they start a group only to run themselves out of business? "It's not because of a commercial motivation. It's also not because of an anti-commercial motivation. These aren't people who are motivated by sticking it to The Man....They changed the world to be more like what they wanted and once it changed, they could stop."

It's that impulse—do what you want in order to get what you want and then go back to whatever you were doing—that Shirky ably captures in Here Comes Everybody. Things that seem trivial become tools for building crucially important, often ad hoc, collaborations. Social media erodes the divide between freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, and intertwining them makes all of them easier to defend.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

License to Drink

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:59:00 EST

If you offer anyone under 21 a drink in North Carolina, you can lose your driver’s license—even if no one goes anywhere near a car. A strict new law took effect in December, just in time to save all those innocent 20-year-olds from a corrupting cup of eggnog handed to them by their parents on Christmas Eve.

The legislation is appropriately “zero tolerance,” according to Craig Lloyd, executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Lloyd told the Associated Press the law “is sending a message out to these parents that are providing alcohol that it is illegal in their own homes.”

The North Carolina measure is a more extreme version of policies emerging in several states, including Virginia, New York, and Texas, that punish people for drinking regardless of whether there’s any evidence that they plan to drive. Several jurisdictions have run anti-alcohol stings at bars and restaurants.

Imagine this scenario: Everyone is settled in for the night when the mother of a college sophomore pours her daughter a glass of wine, perhaps while mentioning how pleased she is that her daughter chose to spend the night at home with her parents instead of going out to party with friends. As soon as the first drop of wine hits the bottom of the glass, an actual mother who is against drunk driving could wind up losing her driver’s license, with the warm approval of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Petty Cash

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:05:00 EST

More than two years ago, Pedro Zapeta tried to board a plane home to Guatemala from the United States. He carried a small blue duffel bag filled with what he says were his savings from seven years of working as a dishwasher in Marin County, California: $59,000 in cash. He didn’t declare the money; he says he didn’t know he was required to do so and couldn’t read the signs at the gate. When U.S. security officials spotted his undeclared dough, they confiscated it but let Zapeta go.

At first, Zapeta was accused of being a courier for a drug deal. Prosecutors claimed the cash was bundled in several manila envelopes, just like drug money. But prosecutors dropped the accusations after no drug residue was found on the bills and Zapeta produced letters and pay stubs from his years in the United States. One revealing detail: Zapeta was attempting to board the plane without a passport, which he didn’t know he needed—hardly the behavior of a professional drug courier.

Instead of apologizing and sending Zapeta home to realize his dream of starting a business with his earnings, U.S. District Judge James Cohn declared that Zapeta was free to leave but could take just $10,000 (the legal limit for undeclared cash) with him; the rest of the money was forfeit. Zapeta appealed the decision, but at press time he was facing imminent deportation with a minimum of several months left on his case. Zapeta entered the country illegally, a misdemeanor, but otherwise seems to have led a blameless existence. He says he managed to save so much because he had no girlfriends and because his only entertainment was Spanish-language TV and soccer games in a local park.

People from around the country have sent Zapeta donations totaling $15,000. According to the Palm Beach Post, one check came with a note. “We are disappointed in our own government for having taken your money,” wrote James and Julia Rukin of Lake Worth, Florida. “The government did the wrong thing.”

Bad Bounce

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:07:00 EST

A new report finds that banning payday lending—small, short-term, high-interest loans available from companies like Cash Advance and Check ’n Go—makes customers worse off.

The study, released in November by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looked at two states where payday lending has been banned: Georgia and North Carolina. Authors Donald P. Morgan of the Federal Reserve and Michael R. Strain of Cornell University found that the citizens of those states bounced more checks, complained more about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy more often. The correlation between reduced payday lending and increased credit problems, they write, “contradicts the debt trap critique of payday lending, but is consistent with the hypothesis that payday credit is preferable to substitutes such as the bounced-check ‘protection’ sold by credit unions and banks or loans from pawnshops.”

Industry critics charge that the $15 fee that payday lenders charge for a two-week $100 loan is exorbitant, amounting to 391 percent annually if the loan is rolled over for a year, accruing $15 every two weeks. The Community Financial Services Association of America, an industry group, did the math on the rates incurred with other options, and finds that a $100 bounced check garners a $54 fee, which comes out to an annual percentage rate of 1,409, and a $37 late fee on a $100 credit card balance amounts to an annual percentage rate of 965 percent. The study’s authors confirm this pattern: “Forcing households to replace costly credit with even costlier credit is bound to make them worse off.”

In a dozen other states, including New Mexico, payday lending is already highly regulated or banned. Several states, including Ohio and Virginia, are currently debating curbs or bans on payday lending.

McCain Has His Cake and Eats It, Too

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

Here's the Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that everyone in Washington knows and loves (or hates, or loves to hate): red-faced and hollering about his favorite topic, campaign finance.

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) showed signs of backing off a semi-pledge to accept public financing for the general election. His original statement was not technically a promise. "If I am the Democratic nominee," said Obama, "I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." This week, McCain went for the jugular, proclaiming, "I committed to public financing. He committed to public financing. It is not any more complicated than that. I hope he will keep his commitment to the American people."

It's just a coincidence, of course, that McCain is throwing down on this issue right after the Obama campaign raised a massive $35 million during the last month. And when the conventional wisdom says that Obama is positioned to outspend the senator from Arizona.

Candidates who accept public funding for the general election receive a grant of about $85 million from the federal government. In exchange for that pot of gold, candidates essentially forgo all private fundraising, limiting total spending to the government grant. The money comes from citizens who have checked "yes" to contribute $3 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund on their tax return.

McCain accuses Obama of "Washington doublespeak." But on this particular issue, McCain is a master practitioner. Leaving aside previous legislative ducks and swerves, like his 1995 vote to abolish the public financing system at the presidential level altogether, McCain has had a complex relationship with the public financing of his own campaign in this cycle alone.

There was a midsummer moment last year, now distant in the fruit-fly memories of the political commentariat, when McCain's campaign was "broke and a total joke." To keep afloat, McCain cut staff positions and took out a $3 million loan, using his fundraising lists as collateral. The bank in question, Bethesda Fidelity & Trust, has made campaign loans to many politicians in the past, including Democrat Walter Mondale and Republican Bob Dole, but McCain's particular loan came with a special caveat. He was required to obtain a life insurance policy, lest he fail to survive the campaign, a turn of events that would have drastically hampered his fundraising abilities and thus his ability to repay.

Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, McCain needed another million, and looked to extend his loan at the same bank. The bank said the previous collateral wasn't going to cut it, and asked for additional backing. "They said, 'You've explained how you can afford to borrow more, and how you can pay us back if things go well. What happens if things go badly?' " said Trevor Potter, a McCain attorney.

At that point, McCain had $5 million coming to him through the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) public financing system for the primaries, which matches a percentage of eligilble private contributions. But McCain didn't want to accept the money, since it would have restricted future spending. So in the loan agreement, the campaign assured the bank that it would drop out of the financing system, but that it could reapply for federal matching funds anytime if things really tanked. The federal money would be waiting for McCain—he'd just have to stay in the campaign long enough to collect and make good on his obligations to the bank.

According to The Washington Post, "Under FEC rules, a candidate who uses a certification for federal funds as collateral for a loan is obligated to remain within the public financing system." McCain's campaign denies that this is what it has done, and technically that's true—he promised to drop out of the system as collateral for the loan.

When public funds are used as a guarantee for a loan being taken explicitly so that the candidate can stay out of the public financing system, surely it is time to throw in the towel. The FEC rules, like most of the byzantine campaign-finance-reform legislation that bears McCain's name, just makes more work for clever lawyers, who can always figure out a workaround (remember 527s?).

And yet there's McCain, up on stage, demagoging campaign finance as usual. The whole thing has a feeling of inevitability. As campaigns get longer and longer and more and more expensive, candidates are reluctant to accept spending caps, which is essentially what public financing amounts to. Even if there is a temporary truce—Obama and McCain might escalate this squabble until both actually do have to accept public funding to save face—there are teams already figuring out the kind of workaround that will get private money into a "publicly financed" election. Public funding has always been a chimera, and, as his campaign's tactics reveal, no one knows that better than John McCain.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Mr. Brin Goes to Washington

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

This is what happens when you set up a Washington office.

One day, you're the victim. The big, bad, established corporations are using their influence with Congress to beat up on you and stall important business deals. All you're trying to do is defend yourself from the onslaught. You bring in a lobbying team to defend your reputation and keep an eye on potential future attacks, and then, the next thing you know, you are the big, bad corporation using your influence on Congress to beat up your competitors. What happened? Let's examine a case study.

In April Google set out to purchase DoubleClick, an online ad network, for $3.1 billion. The deal immediately encountered resistance from privacy advocates who fretted about ever-increasing stores of data in Google's hands, and from competitors and regulators concerned about Google's growing market power. The fear was that Google's already significant share of online advertising would be dramatically increased with the purchase of DoubleClick, leading to concerns about diminished competitiveness in the market for online ads. The prime mover of these objections was Microsoft, which lost out to Google in the bidding for DoubleClick.

After much sturm und drang, Google finally got the OK from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the purchase last month, and is likely to get similar approval in Europe shortly.

In its finding [PDF] about the possible harm to competition resulting from the merger, the FTC noted that "the clear majority of third parties expressing such concerns were Google's current or potential competitors." Surprise!

This is just the most recent chapter in a story that begins way back in 2004, when a few people began grumbling about privacy concerns with Google's email service, Gmail. A couple of legislators stuck their noses into the issue and Google started to feel a chill in the air. It was time, they realized, to set up shop in the Capitol City.

Conventional wisdom says that the most important thing for an up-and-coming corporate powerhouse is not to make The Microsoft Mistake: Bill Gates ignored all things political until he woke up one morning to find that his company was monopolist public enemy number one. Charged with illegal bundling of Internet Explorer into its operating system, it looked like the company might actually be broken up into small fragments, as when AT&T was smashed into the "Baby Bells." The battle that followed between Microsoft and the Department of Justice bloodied the company and locked in Microsoft's reputation as the big-bellied robber baron of the digital age (a reputation reason contested in our November 2001 cover story on antitrust hysteria).

To avoid that pitfall, Google decided to get some loafers on the ground in Washington while people can still remember the company's motto ("Don't be evil") and most congressmen felt rather warm and fuzzy about Google (with an emphasis on the "fuzzy," Congress is not remarkably tech savvy, by and large).

"We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs. Adorable. Harmless. A reasonable precaution, nothing more. Riiiiight.

As the DC shop got set up, things looked fine. Google's manifesto for its Washington office is good—really good. They're pro-net neutrality, the dullest important political issue on the table in America today (which is saying something). Reasonable people can disagree on the issue, and reasonable people do—the combination of boring and byzantine makes it hard to build consensus—but the logic of Google's stance is solid, and consistent with the rest of its policy.

Their position on copyright enforcement is moderate and well considered. They seek to maintain the status quo on liability for third party providers online. This is something Google has an obvious stake in, but most reasonable people, including many distinguished judges, agree that no one benefits if someone can sue Facebook because they were offended by party photos posted by a user.

But then, in June 2006, Google co-founder Sergey Brin comes to Washington and has trouble setting up meetings with congressmen. The shop takes things up a notch, hiring another dozen lobbyists and professionalizing the operation.

Last Friday, Microsoft announced a $44.6 billion bid to take over Yahoo!. On Sunday, Google exec David Drummond posted a note on the official Google blog musing aloud about the possibility that Microsoft, were it allowed to bid for Yahoo, would "attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC."

Apparently, Google has decided to take things further by opting for the "do unto others as they have done unto you" strategy.

When a company seeks advantage over its rivals by manipulating the economic and legal environment rather than through open competition, economists call it rent-seeking. It's not a flattering term. The temptation of rent-seek is almost irresistible, especially once you have a lobbying staff in place.

This most recent lashing out at Microsoft isn't the first of its kind. Last summer, Google took on Microsoft's Vista, claiming that the desktop search function discriminated against Google's competing product. Microsoft caved, tweaking Vista to allow Google Desktop. This was a pretty obvious follow-on from the initial antitrust case, and it would have been almost impossible for Google to resist the temptation to take Microsoft down a peg, but it's rent-seeking nonetheless.

Regulatory capture is a related phenomenon. When a company has a longstanding lobbying presence, there's bound to be a certain amount of fraternizing with the enemy. Government agencies often rely on the companies that they are supposed to be monitoring for information about the industry. The tech sector is particularly vulnerable to this problem since entirely new kinds of problems can appear rapidly.

In addition, while it's not technically a manifestation of regulatory capture, the way presidential candidates have been popping in and out of the Googleplex, you'd think it was a diner in Iowa, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) both visiting early last year.

And naturally, inevitably, as night follows day, congressional anti-trust hearings are set to follow. The House anti-trust task force has hearing scheduled for tomorrow, February 8, with the Senate threatening similar action if Yahoo moves in the direction of Microsoft's offer.

Google can (and does) quite fairly point at Microsoft and say "They started it!" But moms never accept that kind of finger pointing after a playground brawl, and we shouldn't either.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.