The legislative boycott by Indiana’s House Democrats pales in comparison to this one from Rhode Island in January 1923. It lasted all year and featured a fistfight and a gas ‘bomb.”

The Rhode Island Senate Democrats were fighting to change how the Senate districts were drawn at the time. Apparently, the 22 Republicans represented 24% of the population while the 18 Democrats represented 74%. (I assume the remaining two percent is some kind of rounding issue.)

(Title, with apologies, from the Church of the SubGenius). The New York Times is going to try its hand at charging for content. They are welcome to try, and they may even succeed. But, I have my doubts.

Historically, intellectual property was not seen as something subject to protection and much in the way of profit. Ideas, once discovered and unveiled by their creator, spread without compensation. Works of art might have been commissioned but, if copies were made, compensation was not anticipated. Anyone willing to undertake the labor of copying a book was free to do so. In the 17th and 18th centuries, copyright started to take off. Initially, it was seen as a tool of censorship by the crown. In the United States, it was seen as a way to induce more creation. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the United States Constitution says that Congress has the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

It’s an instrumental clause. Intellectual property rights of authors aren’t seen as essential in their own right; but rather as a means to an end – inducing more creation. That’s a different proposition from how you normally see intellectual property discussed — for example, you’ll hear copyright infringement described as “theft.” That implies a deprivation of property and a “malum in se” kind of offense. But copying, as contemplated by the U.S. Constitution anyway, isn’t an evil in itself – it’s only bad because it’s prohibited and to the extent that copying inhibits further creation.

So, what do we lose if a place like the New York Times can’t get paid? We lose a variety of journalism and printed material to some extent. But, I would argue that, to a large extent, we lost a lot of what was valuable to profit-maximizing business practices before the Internet changed the business through ease of copying and distribution. Some content is cheap and easy. Opinion columnists and a lot of crime reporting, for example. There is other content that is expensive: in-depth reporting requiring a lot of travel, analysis of a number of sources, and defending lawsuits against groups who might prefer their activities go unreported, for example.

Profit-maximizing business practices had a lot of the more expensive content on its way out before the Internet changed the game. Media has been trending toward things like opinion columnists, crime reporting, and wire feeds without notably reducing subscription prices. This has left media companies less able to defend against the Internet. A guy like me can and will produce a lot of opinion for free. I can’t and won’t do a lot of hard reporting work. We don’t need copyright protections to induce creation of the easy stuff – look at YouTube and the blogosphere.

So, why pay for the New York Times? To get some Judy Miller stenography on the nuclear threat of aluminum tubes as told to her by White House sources? The wisdom of David Brooks? The Internet abounds in creative works. Until newspapers reverse course and commit to producing content of a type unavailable for free, even if that means less return on their journalist dollar, I don’t think people are going to pay much for them.

The news out of Wisconsin is that the state Republicans used some procedural skulduggery to pass Gov. Walker’s union busting measure. Apparently, they called a conference committee at the last minute, without the normally required 24 hour notice. They then split the budget off from the union busting measures. In Wisconsin, apparently, a bill that has no fiscal impact is not subject to the same quorum rules as the ones that have stalled the Wisconsin legislation for the last few weeks.

We’ve heard Walker maintaining, earnestly, that the union busting was necessary to fix the budget. This new claim, that the anti-union measures have no fiscal impact, puts the lie to that claim. This is just union hating. Anyone who claims that anti-union measures were fiscally necessary can now safely be called full of shit.

As a former legislative employee, what interests me more is the last minute conference committee.

The move ended a bizarre two-and-a-half hour legislative sprint in which the Senate hastily gaveled in and sent the measure to a Senate-Assembly conference committee, which typically works out differences between similar bills passed by the two houses.

Although the Senate hadn’t yet passed the bill, Senate rules allow the Senate president to move a bill to a conference committee if the Assembly’s intent is clear and it’s past the amendable stage — a step the Senate took last month.
. . .
The 6 p.m. conference committee lasted just minutes, and featured an angry speech by Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, the only Democratic member present, who accused the Republicans of violating the state’s open meeting law and “trampling on democracy.”
“Mr. Chairman, this is a violation of law,” he said, referring to the short notice given for the meeting.

Typically, 24 hours’ notice is required for a public meeting. There are exceptions, but it was not clear Wednesday that the conference committee met those standards.

It was before my time, but rumor has it that Sen. Garton, long time Republican leader of the Indiana Senate, did a lot to clean up procedural shenanigans that used to be pretty common, one of which was to call last minute conference committees – or last minute room changes for conference committees. Sen. Garton apparently regularized how the Senate did its business, and that has done a lot to instill faith in the process. I’m not sure the importance of that can be overstated. Unless people buy into the legislative process, legislation is really just words on a piece of paper backed up by guys with guns.

The Lafayette Journal & Courier has an editorial poking some gentle fun at the National months, days, and weeks of this or that; then proposes that March be devoted to basketball.

The editorial board notes the obvious. March isn’t what it once was in Indiana before the IHSAA committed the greatest crime against humanity since . . . well, did a bad thing – I’m afraid I was about to overstate things somewhat.

Call us old-fashioned, but we miss the old Indiana high school tournament, when high-enrollment Goliath schools tipped off against the small-town Davids — often with the same outcome as the biblical story. The madness of March seemed that much more manic when everyone played everyone else.

For my part, seared in my mind are Richmond’s epic struggles against Connersville in the Regionals, battling for an opportunity to go to the semi-state at Hinkle. The semi-state games at Hinkle were as electric as anything I’ve ever experienced. The sun streaming in through those enormous windows, the bleachers flexing as the student section jumped up and down in unison. And, of course, the state finals where Richmond teams went to lose to Marion two out of three years. (But, there was that one year when Richmond finally pulled it off.)

So, anyway, I could sign on for an effort to designate March as basketball month; but I’d suggest an amendment to compel the IHSAA to go back to one class basketball. Because that’s the right way. That’s the Indiana way.

More than anything else, this tells me that lawmakers aren’t terribly serious about balancing the budget. Bill Straub, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, tells us:

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted to slash programs affecting everything from poison control to Big Bird in their crusade to corral the $14 trillion national debt, but one item in the federal budget managed to sail through untouched — the farm subsidy program.
. . .
Many Republicans in the lower chamber, though committed budget cutters, hale from farm states where subsidy cuts would not be appreciated.

Cutting poison control center funding but not agricultural subsidies? I understand you’re going to prefer cutting funding that benefits people who voted for the other guy, but this seems beyond the pale.

Mikel Livingston, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article about a laudable effort to improve financial literacy, banking in particular, initiated by city officials and participating area banks.

Participants are required to take 45- to 60-minute financial education course created by Homestead Consulting Services through a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette. Once they are certified, participating banks will allow them to open a checking account in spite of prior mismanagement or never having had an account before.

The impetus behind this was apparently the realization that “the average person without a bank spends 5 percent of their net income on check cashing or cashier’s check fees.”

Financial illiteracy and innumeracy generally is a challenge. Lots of people don’t seem to grasp the principles behind interest, for example. Beyond mere understanding, there is also probably some interplay between delayed and instant gratification going on. The check cashing service isn’t taking $10 from that $200 check, they’re giving you $190 for a lousy piece of paper!

You’ve probably seen the joke making the rounds:

A unionized public employee, a member of the tea party and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.

What has really been striking to me is the fancy dancing being done by those who favor busting unions but hated the idea of returning to the Clinton tax structure on incomes over $250,000. At the time, we heard that $250,000 per year is not rich. And, you know what. I can buy that. $250k per year is comfortable, and a lot more than most people make; but it’s not “go to hell” money where you can coast and ignore the rest of the world if that’s what you want to do. (Never mind for the moment that the plan wouldn’t start making a significant difference in your taxes until you were moving above $250k. You’d pay a few cents extra on your first dollar above $250k, but it’s not going to break you.)

Standing alone, the effort to portray people making in excess of $250k as “just folks” is probably at least an arguably defensible position. But, the position becomes indefensible when combined with the latest round of attacks on unionized public employees as being paid too much what with their fancy pants health care and pensions and whatnot.

As an aside, I believe that when the issue was increased taxes for people earning over $250,000, the argument was made that in such a fragile economy, we couldn’t deprive these people of economy stimulating income. Somehow that’s not a concern when the compensation of ordinary workers is at issue.

The favored angle of attack against public sector workers is to stoke the jealousy of private sector workers whose wages have stagnated over the past several decades. It’s an old game. Reminds me of the quote from railroad financier Jay Gould about how he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

Richard Wolff, writing in the Guardian, has a pretty succinct article advancing the argument that the rich have done an effective job of soaking the rest of us over the past thirty or forty years. When folks bother to recall that income disparity wasn’t quite as stark in the 50s and that a working class wage used to do quite a lot for a family, the usual explanation was that post-World War II was simply different. Now that the rest of the world does not lay in tatters, our economy can’t yield that kind of wealth for everyone.

First, Wolff points out that the rich have dramatically reduced their tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the middle class and the poor. Second, since their tax burden has come down, their share of the total national income began to rise. He points out that the tax-the-rich years saw lower unemployment and faster economic growth than we’ve seen in years. He also notes a nice trick for people with money – once the government reduced taxes, it ran deficits wherein the people who got tax breaks got to loan that money to the government at interest. They have also been able to take that money and invest it in places like China & India in ventures that were then used to export jobs.

Robert Creamer takes a look at America’s post-war economic history and finds that:

This stagnation of middle class incomes has not happened because our economy has failed to grow over this period. In fact, real (adjusted for inflation) per capita gross domestic product (GDP) increased more than 80% over the period between 1975 and 2005. In the last ten years, before the Great Recession, it increased at an average rate of 1.8% per year. That means that if the benefits of economic growth were equally spread throughout our society, everyone should have been almost 20% better off (with compounding) in 2008 than they were in 1998.

But they weren’t better off. In fact, median family income actually dropped in the years before the recession. It went from $52,301 (in 2009 dollars) in 2000 to $50,112 in 2008. And, of course it continued to drop as the recession set in.

He also finds that the federal government has remained relatively constant as a function of GDP since World War II, median household tax burden has dropped slightly. Worker productivity has increased significantly while hourly wages has increased only 1% and median family income has dropped 0.9%. What has changed is that people who work for a living are getting a smaller and smaller share of America’s economic pie. “Virtually all of the increase in our gross domestic product over the ten years before the Great Recession went to the wealthiest 2% of the population. . . . . Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1%, while real income of the richest one percent rose 135%.”

So, to conclude, I’m not sure that in the real world the CEO would be content with just 11 of the cookies. But, it’s a good joke.

Rebecca Green, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has a report on the 27 year sentence given to Matthew McChesney for wholesale pot distribution. More than 6,700 pounds of marijuana was seized from his home.

Normally, this isn’t the kind of thing I’d much notice, but last weekend, my buddy and I had a little debate about whether jail time was appropriate for the Alabama fan who poisoned oak trees with symbolic importance to Auburn fans. My friend was of the opinion that, at the end of the day, the guy just killed a couple of trees and so maybe locking the guy up wasn’t the most appropriate punishment. I didn’t have strong opinions on whether jail was the right punishment, but felt very strongly that what the tree poisoner did was more blameworthy than crimes for which we do impose jail time.

Marijuana offenses were my prime example. You sell a plant that is illegal by operation of law but which isn’t overly harmful, and you can get significant jail time. The Auburn tree poisoner, by contrast, was acting deliberately to harm other humans. If those were mere trees, the guy wouldn’t have poisoned them. It was the fact that they were special to others that caused him to target those trees in particular. That’s why I feel the latter offense is more serious than the former.

The Indiana General Assembly is considering a bill that would direct a summer study committee to consider whether marijuana should be legalized, penalized less severely, and/or be made available for medical purposes.

Tom Davies, writing for the Associated Press, has more details on the prosecution of Indiana Secretary of State, Charlie White. Of particular interest to me were the remarks of IU Law Professor Craig Bradley who says that White might have a plausible defense that White’s busy schedule caused him to screw up. However:

Bradley said prosecutors could argue that White had the political knowledge to know what he was doing was wrong.

“He would be in a position where he should know and follow the rules and perhaps make it more difficult for him to make an honest mistake kind of claim,” Bradley said.

(Professor Bradley is just all kinds of awesome, so I perk up whenever he’s quoted. He was an assistant U.S. attorney in the 70s and subsequently clerked for Justice Rehnquist. More importantly, he has a great deadpan sense of humor and was a good criminal law professor.)

White is represented by movement conservative lawyer, Jim Bopp out of Terre Haute, who is usually seen advocating Republican voting law initiatives who is blaming White’s actions on a “chaotic personal situation.”

I think White’s “I was busy” defense is a lot of bunk. Rather, to the extent he was “confused” about the law or its application to him, I think it can be adequately explained by the Upton Sinclair quote:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

If White is convicted of a felony, he will be ineligible to serve as Secretary of State. Ordinarily, this would leave the matter of a replacement up to the Governor. However, the state Democrats are maintaining that, because the matters underlying White’s indictment pertain to whether he should have been on the ballot in the first place, the law requires that the second highest vote recipient – Vop Osili – should take White’s place.

I don’t know about what the law requires as to replacement in this situation. But, I think the “right” result depends on whether you view voters as voting for a party where the individual candidate is incidental or whether you view them as voting for a candidate where the candidate’s party is incidental. If the former, then the Republicans should get to choose a replacement; if the latter, then Osili should be the replacement.

Lisa Trigg, writing for the Terre Haute Tribune Star, has a story reporting on charges against a Terre Haute pharmacist charged with committing fraud to the tune of $3.5 million. Apparently he would initiate a prescription that would be billed to Indiana Medicaid, then void the prescription before the system processed it in a way that would make it evident to other people working at the pharmacy that prescriptions were going unfilled. If the charges are true, it looks like this pharmacy billed Indiana Medicaid for $8 million, only about 56% of which was legitimate.

As part of the investigation, federal authorities seized five Harley Davidson motorcycles, a Corvette sports car, a Mustang sports car, four sport utility vehicles, an all-terrain vehicle and trailer, two pickup trucks, and more than $261,000 in funds from multiple bank accounts.

So, it doesn’t look like the guy was stealing just because he was in over his head on a mortgage or something. He liked his toys.

I think part of the reason I like seeing this kind of crime being prosecuted is that it makes me feel like less of a chump for keeping my nose to the grindstone and my recreational pursuits modest.