If you’re a supporter of liberty and limited government and you live in Washington, DC, you should really be a member of America’s Future Foundation. It’s a fantastic organization for aspiring policy wonks (and aspiring political hacks, but I doubt any of those read my blog) to meet like-minded professionals and to get hands-on experience with leadership in a free-market organization.

When I lived in DC, AFF was an ideal way to meet other people in the policy world and to get a night’s entertainment watching libertarians and conservatives snap at each other over gay marriage, the war in Iraq, immigration, and other issues. Since moving to St. Louis, I’ve continued to serve as science and technology editor of Brainwash, AFF’s online magazine. Working on Brainwash has given me hands-on experience with writing a regular column and editing others’ articles.

There are dozens of opportunities like that in AFF–speaking on panels, organizing events, writing for DoubleThink, etc. That makes it a unique organization and one you should support. They’ve got a dynamic new leadership and are in the midst of a membership drive that ends today, so you should head lickety-split over to their website and sign up to be a member!

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Those of you who know me IRL know this, but I guess I never officially noted that I’ve moved to St. Louis. I’m working at the Show-Me Institute, where I’ve begun writing op-eds, doing policy research, and generally helping to set the place up (our office opened the same week I arrived).

At the moment I’m at the annual right-wing state think tanks convention in Charleston, SC, learning all about tax cutting, school choice, and health care reform.

I’ve got a couple of things I’ve been meaning to blog about the new job and the convention. Also, like the last two posts, expect more of the posts to be inspired by goings on here in Missouri. In particular, property rights is a really hot issue here. I’m in awe of the degree to which it crosses party, racial, and ideological lines. I attended a meeting with local grassroots property rights activists on Tuesday, and although no one identified themselves by party or ideology, I got the feeling that a lot of the people making passionate speeches about the importance of property rights were liberal democrats.

Regardless of party or ideology, anyone in this country who’s ever owned a home or business has a visceral attachment to the sanctity of private property, especially when it comes to peoples’ homes. I think the liberal intelligentsia that’s been lamely defending the Supreme Court’s tortured rationalization for allowing powerful corporations to take less powerful peoples’ homes and businesses are going to be surprised at the strength of the populist backlash over the next year, not only from libertarians and conservatives, but from people who are normally on their side, too.

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Ezra wonders why I think that legalizing brothels would make the market for hookers un-sketchy.

I think it’s safe to say that in the vast majority of cases, neither the John or the hooker wants to be on the street. The primary reason they’re there is that there are no legal ways for the prostitute to effectively advertise her wares and no effective way for the johns to locate a willing prostitute.

I mean, if a guy of modest means wants a hooker, how exactly does he find her? At the high end of the sex market there are prostitutes who operate by word-of-mouth referrals. But they’re likely to only deal with customers they know can pay, and they’re unlikely to accept someone who hasn’t been referred to them out of fear of being caught. There are going to be a lot of johns who don’t have access to those networks. And there are “escort” services, but (I should note this is all speculation since I haven’t tried them myself) they’re expensive, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get more than mere escorting from any given escort. So if you have a limited budget, you won’t want to screw around (so to speak) with escort services that may or may not give you what you want.

Legal brothels would be able to (discreetly) advertise their services, and they would be able to provide even lower-fee prostitutes places to work. Any john would be able to look up “brothel” in the yellow pages, and he would know exactly what he was getting for his money.

The argument’s even stronger when you look at things from the woman’s side of things. Working on the streets is dangerous, stressful, dirty, and provides an uncertain stream of business. It’s hard to imagine any woman choosing to voluntarily work on the street when there are safe, legal alternatives available. Note that even working at a hotel doesn’t provide nearly as much safety as a brothel would, since the brothel could have a bouncer whose job it was to look out for the safety of the women in the brothel.

Even if, as Ezra suggests, there are weirdos out there who prefer to pick women up off the street, I suspect there would be very few women who would be willing to take the risk once there were alternatives available.

Now, would there still be a few hookers out on the street? Maybe. There might be a few who can’t find a job in a brothel, or who cater to the occasional weirdo who prefers to pick women up off the street. But the enforcement problem would be much easier. Once you gave them a place to go, most women would move to brothels voluntarily. And you’d probably have enough space to jail the rest of they refused to stay off the street. The problem would be manageable in a way that it isn’t now.

In the interest of precluding myself from ever having a political career, let me point out that this is a perfect example of why brothels should be legal:

“It doesn’t just affect the prostitutes and the johns – it affects everybody,” said Sarah Ulrich, a resident of the Marine Villa neighborhood, off South Broadway near the Anheuser-Busch brewery. “Women cannot walk down the street without somebody circling the block.”

A john once approached her 13-year-old daughter, Ulrich said.

“‘Are you working?’ That’s what he said,” Ulrich recalled.

Alderman Ken Ortmann receives constant complaints about people having sex in cars and condoms being left in alleys. One of the most notorious sections for prostitution is on the city’s near South Side, between Jefferson Avenue, Gravois Avenue and Arsenal Street.

None of those problems–solicitation on the streets, sex in cars, condoms in the alleys, children being solicited–would be a problem if prostitutes were allowed to ply their trade in a safe, indoor environment.

I’d be really curious to know what the advocates of these laws think they’re accomplishing. If they’re arresting the same prositutes over and over again, and if the johns keep streaming in from the suburbs, it’s obvious they’re not going to get rid of the problem any time soon. I imagine they’d say something about society “sending a message” about the ethics of prostitution. But it’s pretty clear that neither the prostitutes nor the Johns much care what the state thinks of their behavior. And if the women were allowed to ply their craft in private, they wouldn’t be such a visible affront to societal mores.

Publishers have sued to stop Google Print, a search engine for books, on the theory that it’s an infringement of copyright to make digital copies of copyrighted books, even if they never show those copies in their entirety to anyone.

The publishers’ position is anti-innovation in a very fundamental way. In the analog world, there’s a clear distinction between “using” a copyrighted work (say, reading a book) and “copying” it (say, using a photocopier). Copyright law says that you’re allowed to use a book you legally own, but generally speaking, you can’t make copies, at least not in a commercial product.

But the “physics” of the digital world are different. Every “use” of content involves the creation of a copy of that data. When you read this web page, dozens of copies of the document were created as it was passed across the Internet. If making a digital copy is a copyright infringement, that means that no one can use their copyrighted content on digital systems without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

Fortunately, that’s not how the courts have ruled in the past. In 1984, the Supreme Court held that it was a fair use to make personal copies of TV shows for the purpose of “time shifting.” In the 1999 Diamond decision, the Ninth Circuit held that “space shifting”–making copies of music for listening on an MP3 player is a fair use. And in 2002, the Ninth Circuit held that displaying thumbnails of copyrighted images is a fair use. In each case, the court appreciated that new technological realities made the copying involved in these uses fundamentally different than the copying prohibited by traditional copyright law.

Unfortunately, judges have not always been so clear-sighted. In the 2000 MP3.com case, a stubbornly literalist district judge held that storing copies of CDs on MP3.com’s servers for future transmission to customers (all of whom had shown they were legal owners of the CDs) was not a fair use. Unfortunately, that case was settled before it could be appealed.

The courts need to clearly say that the mere act of making a digital copy is not a violation of copyright. What matters is how those copies are used. Fortunately, I think the folks at Google understand what’s at stake, and they know that the future of their business may depend on this issue. They are in the business of organizing the world’s information, most of which is owned by other people. If they have to get permission from each individual copyright holder, many of the innovative things they’d like to do with that information will become logistically impossible. So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that Larry and Sergei fight this thing all the way to the Supreme Court.

(cross-posted to the TLF)

I’m bewildered by reactions like this to women who express a desire to be homemakers:

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

Hey Dr. Wexler: There’s nothing to “solve.” If you think the women are making poor choices, you should take every opportunity to talk them out of it. But if they listen to your arguments and decide full-time motherhood is the choice for them, it’s a free country. You should butt out.

I’m more than a little puzzled by the charge that there have been “no social changes to support” women who want full-time careers. There are nannies and day care centers aplenty in major cities. The women in this article will have plenty of financial resources at their disposal to take advantage of those options. And things like flexible working schedules and telecommuting have only become more common in the last quarter century. What other “social changes” are needed?

Probably the most obnoxious trait of the modern feminist movement is its tendency to treat all gender issues as political. Deciding whether to be a stay at home mother is a personal issue like choosing your religion, your spouse, or your retirement plan. Obviously, we all give each our friends advice on those sorts of important life decisions, but when some people make choices that others don’t approve of, it’s not generally considered a political problem that needs to be “fixed.”

I for one am glad to see that unlike Dr. Wexler, a lot of women understand that this is a private issue, and they’re under no obligation to justify their career decisions to anyone outside of their families.

I have to say I’m pretty happy to see that President Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of his presidency. Between the ongoing debacle in the Persian Gulf and the brand new debacle on the Gulf of Mexico, the president has shown himself to be an all-around lousy leader, both on a strategic level and as a day-to-day administrator.

Which brings me to Will’s recent post calling Matt to task for his assertion that Democrats are more competent than Republicans.

To some extent, I think Will’s right–Bush’s failings don’t have anything in particular to do with the president’s (largely non-existent) commitment to limited government. And there’s a lot of truth to the observation that it doesn’t matter terribly much who’s at the top of the pyramid. The federal bureaucracy is so large that the people actually doing stuff owe their obedience far more to the career civil servants a layer or two above them than they do to the tiny handful of political appointees at the top of the food chain. No president, no matter how talented, can make the federal bueaucracy work well, as a litany of Clinton administration failures (Waco was just the first of many) makes clear.

Still, at the margin, competence matters. It’s hard to imagine that whoever Al Gore or John Kerry would have appointed to would be less competent than Michael Brown. And in reacting to short-term crises like Katrina, decisive leadership from the top does make a difference. An organization run by an incompetent, poorly-informed leader becomes paralysed with indecision, because no one wants to stick his neck out for a decision that might later get second-guessed by his superiors. Managing a bureaucracy is a skill that can be learned, and a great administrator can make a large bureaucracy accomplish more than a lousy one.

So I think both Matt and Will were half right. Matt seems to be right that the Bush administration is more incompetent and corrupt than average for American presidents, but he’s wrong to pin the blame for that state of affairs on Bush’s supposed limited-government ideology. Will is right that a well-run bureaucracy is a contradiction in terms, and that the first priority is to get the institutional incentives right so that individuals don’t have the perverse incentives created by life under a government bureaucracy.

But given that we do have a federal agency like FEMA, and given that natural disasters like Katrina do happen, I think it’s far from irrelevant whether the guy calling the shots knows what he’s doing. FEMA has control of tens of billions of dollars, and even small incremental improvements in the way that money is used can make a big difference in the lives of New Orleanians. Getting institutions set up so that the incentives are right is certainly the top priority. But given that we have the institutions we have, I also think demanding honesty and competence from our elected officials is worth doing.

Now Will doesn’t directly contradict any of this. But I think his point would have a lot more force if he directly acknowledged it. I don’t think Matt’s right that, in general, Democrats are better administrators than Republicans. But I do think it’s true that, in general, the Clinton administration was more honest and competent than the present Bush administration. And I think that, regardless of ideology, that’s something we should all be outraged about, whether or not we think Bush’s party or ideology is a causal factor in his incompetence.

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What’s the point of reading The Onion when real newspapers has gems like this description of the president’s “freedom” walk?

Pentagon officials took drastic measures to control participation in the march, with the route fenced off and lined with police. The estimated 10,000 people who took part all had to register online beforehand and city officials warned that anyone seeking to join without the proper credentials would be arrested.

Participants, many of them government employees and their families, were each given a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words Freedom Walk on the front and the name of sponsors on the back. Those included the defence contractor Lockheed Martin, the right-wing daily Washington Times, McDonald’s and the US Army magazine Stars and Stripes.

But at least two protesters wearing T-shirts with messages opposing the war in Iraq managed to take part, although they were closely followed by secret service agents.

The organizers only missed one detail: the shirts should have been brown.

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Know what’s inspiring? More than a thousand people offering free rooms to Katrina victims. Some of them are likely too far away to be of much help, but it’s impressive to see the outpouring of support. Makes me wish I had a spare bedroom.

I wonder how many Katrina victims have Internet access and will think to check Craig’s list for help.