A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

John Powers, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has been doing an outstanding series of articles about the events leading up to the Battle of Tippecanoe. Today, he has another excellent one about the battle itself.

The battle was a much closer affair than I had been lead to believe. But, the stories about the Prophet telling his men that the enemy’s bullets would bounce off of them is apparently more or less true.

In an effort to give his warriors a psychological edge, [The Prophet] promised to use his magic to protect them. The Prophet assured his warriors that if they killed Harrison, the Master of Life would grant them victory. The Prophet promised that the Americans’ gunpowder would turn to dust and their bullets would turn into mud.
. . .
As the battle continued to rage, messengers brought word to the Prophet that the American’s bullets were quite effective. He told them to continue to fight and that soon everything would be as it should.

This should be a lesson to prophets and religious people everywhere that statements about what your higher power can or will do should never be falsifiable. You should always be able to plausibly say that your higher power behaved exactly as promised or that he/she/it did not do so because of the believers’ lack of faith.

In any event, my understanding is that, following this battle, Tecumseh’s resistance was effectively over and that American settlement was opened to the Mississippi.

Niki Kelly has a good article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that I probably would’ve just added to my “News of Interest” widget on the sidebar, but Google Reader has switched to a “Google+” model and that feature is broken for the time being.

It discusses state employee health plans. Apparently the traditional plan has become cost prohibitive enough that most state employees have gone into a high deductible, Health Savings Account plan. I would suspect the ones who have remained on the traditional plan are those with known health issues in the family who know that paying for their known issues would be more expensive than paying the higher premiums. I would further suspect that this is creating a vicious cycle in the traditional plan where, with primarily high cost individuals in the plan, the premiums go up, forcing more less expensive policy holders out of the plan, leading to a more expensive average plan participat, leading to higher premiums, forcing more people out; etc.

I don’t know where the balance is. It seems fine to make people rethink when to go to the emergency room versus urgent care versus regular doctor’s hours and fine to have people consider using generics versus higher cost prescriptions. But, the HSA/high premium model goes much further; causing people to have to, essentially, gamble on their health in ways they can’t afford if they lose.

And, incidentally, these gambles probably increase overall health costs and public spending if we aren’t willing to let people who lose these gambles simply die without spending public money on them. If the public is the health care financer of last resort, paying only when the individual is wiped out and only for acute, crisis care; the public is going to pay a lot of money and the individual is going to have a miserable quality of life.

Angela Mapes Turner has an article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette entitled “State Enters Debate Over Wind Energy.” The article refers to people and organizations in the state as opposed to state government. It seems that most action on wind regulation is taking place at the local level. My law partner was actively involved in developing Tippecanoe County’s, so I’m not going to get into any specifics about wind regulation in my area.

I think counties are going to be better off if they get ahead of this issue. The article says that Whitley County starting developing its ordinance only after wind development was getting started. This caused a problem because the ordinance under development had to be scrapped when it came to light that the plan commission’s President had signed a contract related to the lease of his land to wind developers. DeKalb County is apparently preparing land use regulations in advance of any specific interest in wind development.

It will be interesting to see the long term viability of wind energy. At the moment, it is very dependent on subsidies; but, then, our entire energy economy is lousy with subsidies. What would oil energy look like if U.S. foreign policy resolutely treated countries with oil the same as countries without? Or, if government never got involved in building roads? Let alone the direct subsidies for, among other things, exploration. In terms of good policy, I’m more enthusiastic about wind than, say, biofuels — using your top soil and food to power your cars just sounds like bad long term thinking.

But, Benton County gives me pause on wind energy. At first, those wind farms are pretty cool looking; but I’m not sure that I’d want to live next to them. Maybe it’s something you rapidly get used to; but they dominate the landscape. I imagine it’s disconcerting when the sun is shining through the blades and you get a movie projector flicker going.

The State government isn’t, so far as I know, taking an active role in regulating wind farm development; so local governments that want to strike a balance between the wind developers and the neighbors of landowners selling or leasing to those developers probably need to make an effort now rather than after the wind turbines all go up.

I saw three headlines that somewhat unintentionally went together:

Senate Republicans block Obama infrastructure plan. Even though the plan had a majority support, because of a filibuster, the $60 billion infrastructure plan won’t go any further.

Work has begun on the Sherman Minton Bridge across the Ohio River. The bridge was closed because of a significant crack in a load bearing part of the bridge. The winning bid was $13.9 million and work is estimated to start in December.

Economists expect slow growth in 2012. The state and national economies should expand somewhat in 2012 but not enough to reduce the unemployment rate. A major component of the weak economy, according to an economist quoted in the article, is government inaction.

So, we clearly have an infrastructure need. We have people unemployed, able and willing to do the work – probably cheaper now than when the economy recovers, and we have government inaction standing in the way. Senators Lugar and Coats both contributed to that inaction. Thank you gentlemen.

I did a lot of driving today and listened to one of my favorite podcasts, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. Among a lot of other things, he clued me in to a man by the name of Luigi Galleani. If I’d ever heard about this guy, it never took. He was a charismatic anarchist who advocated direct violence against the powerful. But he never, apparently, engaged in direct violence himself. Sacco and Vanzetti are counted among his most prominent followers.

I knew of them, but mostly heard that their trial was sketchy and tainted by racism. Probably I’d heard something about anarchism; but really have never studied what anarchism meant in the context of the day. They were a source of great anxiety in the U.S. (and elsewhere – e.g. the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) in the early 20th century. They were tied into and inspired by the Labor movement in the 19th century.

Anyway, Galleani seems to have been one of the more influential people I never heard of. Of his oratory skills, one guy said, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw.” The Wikipedia entry also had the text of a flyer accompanying a series of bombs apparently set by Galleanists at homes of Mayor Harry L. Davis of Cleveland, Judge W.H.S. Thompson, Massachusetts State Representative Leland Powers, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

Interesting article by Brian Zimmerman, writing for the Palladium-Item, on decision making on how to change things up at Richmond Community Schools. Their test scores and graduation statistics are indicating improvement, but now the school system is facing declining enrollment and $2.3 million less in funds.

What caught my eye was something mentioned in a way that gives me the idea the Pal-Item has covered the issue more extensively in the past:

At Richmond High School, a reported 29-percentage-point gain in graduation rate — from 54 to 83 percent — exists against the controversial backdrop of students with academic records approximating those of high school dropouts leaving RHS under cover of being home-schooled.

Today’s reform is tomorrow’s corruption. Little oversight over home schooling is seen as a way to allow parents to educate their children as they see fit; without much government interference. The implication from that paragraph, suggests that the same mechanism can be used as a substitute for formally dropping out due to lack of interest or academic ability. Which raises a secondary question: who should get tagged with the failure of these students? Is it a failure of the public school or of the home school? This looks like the educational equivalent of setting up subsidiary corporations to move losses off the books of the main corporation.

John Powers, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has a truly excellent article explaining the run-up to the Battle of Tippecanoe. Today marks the 200th anniversary of William Henry Harrison’s departure from Fort Harrison near Terre Haute. The battle itself would take place nine days later near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers; the town of Battle Ground has grown up in the area.

This battle ended up breaking the back of Indian resistance east of the Mississippi. The remarkably capable Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, had been organizing tribes, trying to get them to agree to the principle that the Indians owned their land in common and would not negotiate sale of their land. In 1809, about two years earlier, there had been the Treaty of Fort Wayne where Harrison had negotiated the acquisition of about 3 million acres in what is now Indiana and Illinois. Tecumseh refused to recognize the deal and, on two occasions, met with Harrison. Critically, according to Powers, Tecumseh refused to guarantee the safety of parties attempting to survey the new acquisition.

Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa a/k/a “the Prophet,” had built a village on the Wabash, just downstream from the Tippecanoe River. (Incidentally, reading Tenskwatawa’s biography on Wikipedia has strong similarities to Sen. Joe McCarthy — an alcoholic who rises to prominence demonizing a foreign power and persecuting members of his own tribe (“witches”) as being in league with that power.) The settlement of Tecumseh and the Prophet had somewhere on the order of 400 warriors dedicated to the notion that Native Americans owned the land in concert and that, among other things, the Treaty of Fort Wayne did not constitute a valid transfer of property. If Harrison couldn’t survey the land, he couldn’t sell it. Stale mate. However, after the second meeting, Harrison knew that Tecumseh would be away from the village (Tecumseh went south to recruit other tribes to his alliance), and Harrison didn’t think much of the Prophet. So, Harrison took the strategically sound, if not entirely honorable, tactic of moving on the village while Tecumseh was gone.

The rest, as they say, is history. It’s also a good illustration of how the real world works. Property rights, far from being inalienable or natural, don’t mean squat – effectively don’t exist, I’d argue – without a government strong enough and willing to enforce them. The same holds true for other kinds of rights. We should keep this in mind when property right purists seem to take for granted that property rights will be enforced and other rights will either be ignored or be subservient. There may be good policy reasons for granting this kind of preference, but the priority of property rights should not be assumed as some kind of natural order.

Pro-tip: always be cautious around products that eschew the proper spelling of “light” for “lite.” Before this week, I would have advanced beers of that name as Cautionary Tale “A” for that principle.

But, now, we have a new poster child: Litebox. This story makes one wonder if the Indiana Economic Development Commission is always so sloppy with its financial incentives or only when there is a rush to get in front of cameras. According to the Indy Star, the incentives offered to Litebox are:

$10 million in state economic incentives and [eligibility] for local tax abatements potentially worth nearly $1 million over 10 years.

Ostensibly, the company would “renovate a local office building and construct a $20 million factory where . . . startup company, Litebox Inc., would make mobile video screens.” But, the owner of Litebox looks a bit like a grifter; indebted to state and local government to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars and to at least one business partner to the tune of $145,000. Public information about his educational background looks to be false.

On Wednesday, Yanagihara first told The Star that his financial backers were “well-heeled” individuals whom he wouldn’t name. Then he said: “Actually, it’s just me.”

Besides Yangihara’s bona fides, the article also calls into question the underlying business plan.

The $20 million that Yanagihara plans to spend to build an assembly factory for truck-mounted media screens in Indianapolis is enough money, Isenberg said, “to buy all of the competitors in the industry.”

Apparently, the product in question just isn’t that labor intensive. This would tie-in nicely with problems the Indiana Economic Development Corporation seems to have with granting incentives to “job creators” that over-promise jobs. The IEDC looks a lot like a political arm of the Governor’s office; an image not helped when Mitch Roob went to work there after screwing up big at FSSA. This episode looks like a campaign event for Mayor Ballard’s re-election efforts that has gone horribly awry.

Ohio is looking to Indiana, specifically our toll road privatization, as an example of what not to do.

Opponents of privatizing Ohio’s Turnpike paint a bleak vision of Indiana’s Toll Road: a pot-hole ridden, poor quality, piece of “crap” with high tolls.

I have not driven up that way in a number of years, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of these characterizations. Since the 75 year lease (just 70 years to go!) went into place, on occasions where the Toll Road was an option, I have generally chosen alternate routes. Sure is nice of drivers in Northern Indiana to pay for a lot of road construction in the rest of the state though.