Category Archives: Government

Meet the Ultimate Beer Bureaucrat

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Who knew? If you want to sell beer in the US you have to get the label approved by one guy:

Any brewery that wants to market its wares in this country needs to get it through Kent “Battle” Martin, giving the federal official extraordinary power. With only vague regulations outlining what is and isn’t permissible, he approves beer bottles and labels for the Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB, a section of the Treasury Department…

This year, Battle has singlehandedly approved over 29,500 beer labels, the only fact his press handler would provide…

Most government departments are nebulous and anonymous. But because of the sheer volume of his interactions with brewers, Battle has become a symbol for the TTB’s nonsensical rules…

Battle has rejected a beer label for the King of Hearts, which had a playing card image on it, because the heart implied that the beer would have a health benefit.

He rejected a beer label featuring a painting called The Conversion of Paula By Saint Jerome because its name, St. Paula’s Liquid Wisdom, contained a medical claim—that the beer would grant wisdom.

He rejected a beer called Pickled Santa because Santa’s eyes were too “googly” on the label, and labels cannot advertise the physical effects of alcohol. (A less googly-eyed Santa was later approved.)

Information is Power, Sharing it is Trust

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“Information is power. When I have it and won’t give it to you, it signals that I don’t trust you to know what to do with it. In turn, it erodes your trust in me.” John Robinson

The quote above is from an excellent blog post by John Robinson that argues for more transparency from our government. It’s not long and it’s worth the couple of minutes it will take you to read it.

Airing of Grievances Coming to a Commission Meeting Near You

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A front page article in the July 15, 2014 Wall Street Journal makes the point that the recent SCOTUS ruling allowing prayers before public meetings is an opportunity for atheists too:

The former president of the Freethinkers of Upstate New York, Mr. Courtney says he plans to give a four-minute speech highlighting the notion that the country was founded on the authority of the people, and the importance of ensuring Americans of all types are heard.

He will be the first atheist to address the Greece town board. Before the Supreme Court ruling, the town board allowed a Wiccan priestess to deliver an invocation.

While Mr. Courtney disagrees with the Supreme Court’s ruling, he takes some comfort in his view that it weakened what he calls Christianity’s “de facto monopoly on invocations.”

“In a sense, it has opened the door for a bit of a free-for-all,” he says.

The article also mentions the Pastafarians who are planning to offer their own prayers. Personally I’d like to see observers of the Festivus holiday take their turn at the podium to air their grievances. Not familiar with Festivus? Check out the video clip below and you’ll get it.

Our own Forsyth County Commission’s case is mentioned in the article of course. That case has irked me long enough that I can’t stomach giving it another minute of my life to think about, but I will say this: the true test will be when the commission is faced with having to entertain an invocation from a hard core satanist. It’s one thing to listen to a non-believer offer up generic messages of inclusion and cooperation, but it’s an entirely different ballgame to listen to someone ask them to accept guidance from the devil. I wonder if they’ll take their own advice offered to the non-believers who’ve complained about the invocations in the first place – just step out of the room if you don’t like it?

Basic Income Guarantee

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Until stumbling across a post referencing it at Fred Wilson’s AVC I’d never heard of “basic income guarantee.” So what is it exactly? From Wikipedia:

An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant,[1] or citizen’s income) is a proposed system[2] of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

A basic income is typically intended to be only enough for a person to survive on, so as to encourage people to engage in economic activity. A basic income of any amount less than the social minimum is sometimes referred to as a ‘partial basic income’. On the other hand, it should be high enough so as to facilitate any socially useful activity someone could not afford to engage in if dependent on working for money to earn a living.

Interesting concept, but this quote from Wilson’s post echoes my initial reaction:

I don’t have a formed opinion on this idea. I know that welfare didn’t work out too well in the last century. So I’m nervous about any system that encourages or incents people not to work. But if we really are headed into a world where there aren’t any low skilled jobs, then I guess we need to be talking about ideas like this.

One of Wilson’s colleagues has been writing about the concept and has a couple of posts that explore how this all might work. You can read them here, but this excerpt highlights why this might be a concept worth exploring:

A higher minimum wage, as vigorously argued for in an interesting recent piece on Politico, can inject some short term liquidity into the economy and I am sympathetic to that but it is also a very blunt instrument and still doesn’t help with the many unpriced activities. The same goes for government mandated shorter working hours or longer vacations (although I am pretty sure that Google’s founders did not have a government mandate in mind)…

This brings me once again to the idea of a guaranteed basic income. This is a potentially attractive alternative for a number of reasons:

First, it sets human creativity free to work on whatever comes to mind. For many people that could be making music or learning something new or doing research.

Second, it does not suppress the market mechanism. Innovative new products and services can continue to emerge. Much of that can be artisanal products or high touch services (not just new technology). 

Third, it will allow crowdfunding to expand massively in scale and simultaneously permit much smaller federal, state and local government (they still have a role — I am not a libertarian and believe that market failures are real and some regulation and enforcement are needed, eg sewage, police).

Fourth, it will force us to more rapidly automate dangerous and unpleasant jobs. Many of these are currently held by people who would much rather engage in one of the activities from above.

Fifth, in a world of technological deflation, a basic income could be deflationary instead of inflationary. How? Because it could increase the amount of time that is volunteered.

Very interesting.

A Possible Solution to Gerrymandering

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For my day job I have the fortune of occasionally working with Greg Brown, the Sr VP of Government Affairs for the National Apartment Association. He recently wrote a blog post about term limits for Congress (he’s not in favor of them) and what might be done about gerrymandering, which he sees as the real problem with our political system right now:

The second part of my answer was to suggest that what is worth focusing our attention upon as voters is the process for re-districting in the states. This is a structural change that took hold in the last decade and, in my view, has contributed to the deterioration in problem-solving capabilities in Congress.

After every decennial census, the states undergo a redrawing of the lines for their Congressional districts. This is intended to respond to changes in population (some states gain seats in Congress while others lose seats), ensure compact, contiguous districts and perhaps keep local units of government within the same district. In practice, however, the process has been used by both parties to draw lines that create almost impenetrable partisan strongholds that virtually guarantee one-party control until the next decennial census. You know this process as gerrymandering and it has become increasingly easy due to improvements in technology and mapping. As a result, in at least five states the “opposition” has been relegated to just a few districts while the majority controls the rest of the state. Moreover, the only way majority incumbents can lose is to a primary opponent from their own party. This tactic has been used by Democrats in states where they control the legislature and by Republicans in states they control.

I prefer the approach that Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey and Washington have adopted which is to give the district drawing process to an independent or bipartisan commission. The goal is to reduce the impact of partisan politics. While far from perfect, it has to be an improvement upon what has been done in some of the 34 other states where the legislature draws the lines.  

If the goal of “compact and contiguous” congressional districts is met through these independent or bipartisan entities then you typically have heterogeneous districts not solidly in one party’s hands. That can organically mean fewer extremists of either party. While it does not guarantee more moderates, it does increase the chances that the representative of that district must take into account a wider pool of perspectives than just those of his or her own party. Extrapolate that to Congress and you would have less polarization and more discussion to solve the big issues facing the nation. That should be something we all want. 

I totally agree.

With Malice Toward None

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A quote from Lincoln contained within an Esquire piece titled The United States of Cruelty:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

That is a necessary reminder in this day and age, because the author of the Esquire piece is on to something with this paragraph:

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled — until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

Here’s the thing; our political debates lean towards us vs. them. We agonize over paying taxes that we perceive to be too high because we think that others are riding our coattails. Are some folks slackers? Sure, but many others are victim of circumstance just like those who are beneficiaries of circumstance. In the end what we need to remind ourselves is that a “common good” does exist, that in the end it is better for ALL of us if people have access to good healthcare, clean water, healthy food and a place to lay their heads. We can debate the details about how its done, but we shouldn’t be debating about whether it’s done. That, to me, is the definition of a divided and sick society.

Wrongful Power, Wrongfully Placed

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Okay, this is two days straight that we'll get a very good civics primer from a land use blog and it comes again from Tom Terrell in a post about protest petitions:

In the American system of government, individual citizens are granted rights and freedoms, but not powers.  Rights and freedoms are actions which cannot be prohibited or controlled by a government.  In most instances, they are either (1) limitations on a government’s ability to control what we say and do or to interfere with our lives, or (2) protections of our ability to participate in democratic processes.

Powers, on the other hand, are granted only to individuals who are elected or appointed to office through controlled processes and who swear an oath to uphold the law and use their powers to serve others.  Those powers can be legislative or executive, and they are always subject to judicial review.

Such powers include the ability to pass laws, enforce laws and interpret laws.

Protest petitions run afoul of the American system of government because they aren’t rights or freedoms.  Rather, the protest petition statute grants, to an unelected citizen, the power to manipulate the decision-making authority of a duly-elected legislative body for the citizen’s personal benefit.

Corruption Hurts Us All

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It's not often you'll find something everyone should read on a blog dedicated to land use  and zoning law, but Tom Terrell has a great post about what the corruption case involving Charlotte's ex-mayor means for us all:

The only thing that has raised my ire in the aftermath of this sad event has been listening to citizens and pundits take partisan political glee in watching an opposing party member take a fall for corrupt behavior. Shame on all of us who reacted this way.  And shame on others who gloat when public corruption arises, as it equally does, from Republican ranks.

The public office that is defiled belongs to all of us, not to any party or party faction.

It’s easy to repeat the worn adage that power corrupts. What we should remember is that power and self-governance also ennoble us, in large ways and small, as we go about the daily and sometimes tedious business of running our democratic institutions for the people.

Unfortunately, those are the acts and decisions that don’t create headlines.

Our Poop Problem

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Anyone else feel like we missed a huge opportunity when we didn't use the economic crisis as a reason to put people back to work by engaging them in massive public works projects? Seeing reports about our aging and crumbling infrastructure you can't help but think, "Why didn't we take some of those billions (trillions?) of dollars we spent bailing out various industries and dedicate them to upgrading our roads, bridges and sewers?" Wait…sewers? Yep. Apparently our concrete sewers aren't being eaten by the very stuff they transport:

“The veins of our cities are in serious trouble, and they’re in serious trouble because of corrosion, and this corrosion has been unanticipated and it’s accelerating,” said Mark Hernandez at a symposium on the microbiology of the built environment in Washington DC yesterday. Hernandez is a civil engineer, but he’s meeting with microbiologists because this problem is bacterial. Essentially, it’s an infection of the nation’s sewage system.

Here’s what’s going on. One set of microbes emits hydrogen sulfide, the gas that is also responsible for raw sewage’s unpleasant smell. This gas fills the empty space between the top of the pipe and the water flow. Another set of microbes living in this headspace turns hydrogen sulfide to sulfuric acid, which eats away at concrete, leaving behind gypsum, the powdery stuff you find in drywall.

“Essentially what we’re ending up with is wet drywall,” said Hernandez. This is one reason the American Society of Civil Engineers has gave our wastewater infrastructure a D grade.

Lifestyle and Urban Revitalization

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Recently Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about urban revitalizations and highlighted what he thinks are the critical elements necessary for it to work:

We’ve seen that things can be turned around. The economic and cultural juggernaut that is Brooklyn right now is a perfect example. The grandchildren of the people who fled Brooklyn in the fifties and sixties are now coming back in droves, attracted to its lifestyle, its coffee shops, bars, restaurants, art and culture, parks, and affordable real estate. And the tech companies are coming too. Attracted by all the talent that is there.

I’ve been asked by civic leaders from places like Newark, Cleveland, Buffalo, and a number of other upstate NY cities that have suffered a similar fate how they can do the same thing. They all talk about tax incentives, connecting with local research universities, and providing startup capital. And I tell them that they are focusing on the wrong thing.

You have to lead with lifestyle. If you can’t make your city a place where the young mobile talent leaving college or grad school wants to go to start their career, meet someone, and build a life, all that other stuff doesn’t matter.

This immediately brought Winston-Salem to mind. The city's downtown is definitely enjoying a renaissance, but it's easy to forget how long the road has been and where it all began. Ten years ago when my family first moved to the Camel City there were tax incentives for restuaranteurs who set up shop downtown. I remember thinking it kind of odd because there didn't seem to be a whole lot that downtown offered outside of those restaurants and I wondered who would venture down just to eat. Some restaurants did indeed fail, but it ended up being a small, important piece of the downtown puzzle. Combined with the evolution of the arts scene on Trade Street, the growth of UNCSA's downtown presence, and yes, the maligned-at-the-time BB&T Ballpark project, you have the critical lifestyle element that Wilson identified in his piece. It's no wonder that people now want to live there (see the Nissen Building, Winston Lofts, etc.) and that businesses are moving to the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter.

In short, if you're looking for evidence that supports the importance of culture all you need to do is look downtown, whether in Winson-Salem, Durham or Brooklyn.