First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt.

On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

The new plan is said to be voluntary and involves no new legislation.  Does anyone believe it will stay that way?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked for $6.9 billion in federal funds in his state-budget proposal Friday and warned that state health and welfare programs would be threatened without the emergency help.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's proposed $82.9 billion general-fund budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year would close a $19.9 billion gap over 18 months. In addition to the federal aid, he called for $8.5 billion in cuts and $4.5 billion in alternative funding to balance the budget.

"It's time to enact long-term reforms that will change the way the most populous state and the federal government work together," Mr. Schwarzenegger said. He and state legislative leaders plan to visit Washington to lobby for bailout money. White House budget officials weren't available for comment on the governor's request.

Federal bailouts of state governments are insane not just because they reward profligate state spending. These bailouts also come with strings attached - dictates on how states can run education, welfare, transportation, and so on - and thus quickly destory any remnance of federalism in the United States.

Today I met with the Department of Homeland Security, for a little song and dance.

They made me jump through hoops, ride a unicycle, and dance a jig. Having deemed my performance to be satisfactory, the Department of Homeland Security gave me a cookie.

BOSTON — Martha M. Coakley, the Democrat running for Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, had seemed so certain of winning the special election on Jan. 19 that she barely campaigned last month.

But the dynamic has changed in recent days. ...

And a new poll that showed a competitive race between Ms. Coakley and Mr. Brown has generated buzz on conservative blogs and energized the Brown campaign — though many news organizations dispute its methodology.

Brown is unlikely to win, but if he does, the implications for the health care debate are huge.

Well, it still is in some parts of the world:

KUALA LUMPUR — Rohaya Mohamad, 44, is an articulate, bespectacled medical doctor who studied at a university in Wales. Juhaidah Yusof, 41, is a shy Islamic studies teacher and mother of eight. Kartini Maarof, 41, is a divorce lawyer and Rubaizah Rejab, a youthful-looking 30-year-old woman, teaches Arabic at a private college.

The lives of these four women are closely entwined — they take care of each others’ children, cook for each other and share a home on weekends.

They also share a husband.

So, should polygamy be legal?  To address this question, I think it is useful to consider two prior questions:

Should government "supply" and enforce the particular bundle of contracts known as marriage?

If it does so, should it restrict this supply to opposite-sex couples?

My answer to the first question is no: government should establish and enforce default rules about the division of property from communal living arrangements, about inheritances, and about guardianship of children, but it need not and should not bundle these rules into the particular package known as marriage. 

My answer to the second question is also no.  If goverment is going to supply marriage, it should do so in the most neutral way possible.  This means treating same-sex marriage and polygamy just like opposite-sex marriage.   Government should calls these contracts civil unions, leaving marriage to religious institutions.

David Leonhardt has a terrifice piece in today's New York Times on the Fed's quest for more power.   His key point:

The fact that Mr. Bernanke and other regulators still have not explained why they failed to recognize the last bubble is the weakest link in the Fed’s push for more power. It raises the question: Why should Congress, or anyone else, have faith that future Fed officials will recognize the next bubble?

A related point is that, even without additional power, the Fed could have sounded an alarm about the housing bubble rather than chanting, "All is well."  Imagine how different the last few years might have been if in 2004 the Fed's testimony before Congress had been,

"Housing prices are growing at an unprecedented rate.  While the U.S. has never had a large nationwide decline in housing prices, it has also have had such a huge nationwide increase in prices, so all bets are off. Consumers and banks are becoming obscenely levered.  Fannie and Freddie are issuing mortgages to every borrower with a pulse.  This situation is scaring our pants off!

BAGHDAD -- The banner appeared mysteriously this fall on a railing along Abu Nawas Street, the hub of nightlife on the banks of the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad, where the atmosphere in recent months has grown markedly more subdued.

"Damned is he who sits at a table with alcohol," the handwritten sign said.

Posted near a strip of nightclubs recently raided by police, the unsigned missive spoke to a new fight being fought across Iraq as government officials attempt to assert greater control over the country's moral and social norms.

This is evidence for my view that, when all is said and done, the invasion and occuption of Iraq will have replaced a secular repressive regime with a sectarian repressive regime.

A radical Islamic group planning a protest march through the streets of a town that has achieved iconic status in Britain for honoring the passing hearses of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan ran into a stiff rebuff from the British government on Monday.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a statement saying he was “personally appalled” by the group’s plan to march through the streets of Wootton Bassett, 70 miles west of London, where townspeople have lined the sidewalks since April 2007 to mourn the passing cortèges of British military casualties flown home to the nearby military airbase at Lyneham. ...

Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who is responsible for the police, said in a separate statement that he would support any request from the police or local government officials to ban the march.

The point that the opponents of the march fail to get is that suppressing the march will polarize and alienate Muslims even more.

Six years after New York City passed a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, it is easier than ever to find smokers partying indoors like it’s 1999, or at least 2002. In November, Eater.com called it “the worst kept secret in New York nightlife” that “smoking is now allowed in numerous nightspots, specifically just about any and every lounge and club with a doorman and a rope.” A few weeks later, GuestofaGuest.com, a blog about New York clubs and bars, posted a “smoker’s guide to N.Y.C. nightlife.”

“Everyone looks the other way,” said Billy Gray, 25, a reporter for Guest of a Guest, who says that he knows precisely which high-end bars and lounges, most of them in the meatpacking district or Lower East Side, will let him smoke inside. Far from deterring smoking indoors, the ban simply adds an allure to it, said Mr. Gray, a half-pack-a-day smoker.

“It’s more of an illicit thrill now,” he said. “Like when you were a teenager and snuck a beer in your parents’ basement.”

Thus, as with other prohibitions, smoking bans breed disrespect for the law.

Is a prohibition ever the right policy?  What about the ban on murder?  Take as given that this one is a good idea.  So what's the difference between banning murder and banning smoking in restaurants?

Everyone agrees that murder inflicts grave harm one someone who cannot easily avoid that harm.  Smoking in restuarants does not share this feature.  Even taking the evidence on second-hand smoke at face value, the effects from occasional expsoure are trivial, and anyone who wants to avoid them can stay home or patronize non-smoking restaurants.

Smoking bans are also miguided because they assume restaurants and bars are "public" and should therefore be subject to regulation by government.   Instead, any privately owned establishment should be regarded as fully private, with owners allowed to offer smoking versus non-smoking experiences, as they wish.

A friend from Detroit passes along this story and video about my home town.  News or comedy?

This is how smart they are:

And the only difference with the new president is that he has a better teleprompter system. But even then, it can still fail once in a while:

Obama's Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

All these criticisms are dead on.  Keeping people in homes they cannot afford makes no sense, so policies that attempt to prevent foreclosure are guaranteed to generate perverse side effects.  The horrifying fact is that policy is still subsidizing high-risk mortgages.

Congress is apparently not going to fix the odd dynamics of the estate tax, with awkward implications:

Starting Jan. 1, the estate tax -- which can erase nearly half of a wealthy person's estate -- goes away for a year. For families facing end-of-life decisions in the immediate future, the change is making one of life's most trying episodes only more complex.

"I have two clients on life support, and the families are struggling with whether to continue heroic measures for a few more days," says Joshua Rubenstein, a lawyer with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in New York. "Do they want to live for the rest of their lives having made serious medical decisions based on estate-tax law?"

The greater challenge will toward the end of 2010 if Congress has still failed to act:

Under current laws in effect until the end of this year, the size of the exemption is $3.5 million per individual or up to $7 million per couple. The tax is slated to disappear entirely on Jan 1. ...

The estate tax is scheduled to return in 2011 at a 55% rate with an exemption of slightly more than $1 million.

Thus, next December, heirs will face a strong incentive to pull the cord on ederly relatives.

The right policy is to make repeal permanent.  The estate tax punishes saving relative to spending and serves mainly to prop up the incomes of estate tax lawyers and accountants.

As Shinnecock Indians returned to their reservation on Long Island after World War II, elders warned that their tribe’s long struggle for survival was once again threatened.

Decent jobs were scarce and many Shinnecock veterans were leaving, draining the reservation of needed hands. ...

Now this small tribe on the eastern end of Long Island is on the verge of sketching a new, perhaps more prosperous chapter. The Obama administration’s recent announcement that the Shinnecocks met the criteria for federal recognition finally paves the way for a casino, generating a bounty of jobs and revenue.

The odd fact raised by this story is that the U.S. pays restitution to Indian Tribes by giving them monopoly rights (within a given state or area) to sell casino gambling services. 
 
Here's a different approach: legalize all gambling.  Then have an honest debate about whether, or how much, the U.S. should pay restitution to Native Americans.

According to M.I.T. economist Jon Gruber, the Senate's tax on cadillac health plans is good policy because it

would reduce the incentives for employers to provide excessively generous insurance, leading to more cost-conscious use of health care and, ultimately, lower spending.

Gruber is right, and virtually every economist agrees. The ideal reform would combine increased taxation of employer-provided health insurance with offsetting reductions in personal or corporate income taxes.  Both changes would reduce distortions in the tax system and allow government to raise any given amount of tax revenue with a smaller negative impact on the economy.

But that does not mean government should expand spending, on health insurance or anything else. That is a logically separate question.

Libertarians are fond of noting that government projects can have unintended consequences; here's an example:

The reversal of the Chicago River a century ago, to send the city's sewage to the Mississippi River instead of into Lake Michigan, was hailed as an engineering marvel. Now Michigan is suing Illinois to potentially re-reverse the river to prevent the movement of voracious, invasive Asian carp into the lake.

Perhaps the right action now is to re-reverse the river, but perhaps that will have its own unintended consequences.  Any thoughts?

Besides, aren't carp good eating?   My grandmother made wicked-good smoked carp (using carp spear-gunned in Lake Erie by a neighbor at my grandparents' cottage).  Carp is a delicacy in Europe and Asia.

Think I'm kidding? Check out these carp recipes.

Milton Friedman would not be surprised by this story:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il moved early this month to wipe out much of the wealth earned in the past decade in his country's private markets. As part of a surprise currency revaluation, the government sharply restricted the amount of old bills that could be traded for new and made it illegal for citizens to have more than $40 worth of local currency.

It was an unexplained decision -- the kind of command that for more than six decades has been obeyed without question in North Korea. But this time ... the markets and the people who depend on them pushed back.

Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. ...

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim's power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world's most repressive state -- a change driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country's 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them.

These events do not guarantee that North Korea will soon become a freer state, but they do suggest that economic freedoms help constrain oppressive government, which is precisely the point of Friedman's famous work.

U.S. promises unlimited financial assistance to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

I can think of two possible justifications.

The first is that society wants to promote particular ideas, values, individuals, or the like; think of the 4th of July or President's Day.  I find this defense problematic: the choice of holidays is a vehicle for thought control.

The second justification asserts that legal holidays solve a co-ordination problem by helping people take vacations at the same time as their friends and relatives.  This view has some merit, but a countervailing effect is that promoting specific vacation days generates crowding at airports, beaches, and so on.

So I do not see a convincing justification for government holidays, especially not those associated with religion.

Yes, I know I am a Scrooge.  My family has been telling me this for years.

While driving last night from Wellesley to Charlottesville, I was stopped for not having a working light over the rear license plate.

My wife said, "It makes sense to have such a rule; otherwise police could not read your license (at night)."

My response was, "Why do the police need to read my license plate (at night or otherwise)?  Why require license plates at all?"

The answer is presumably something like, "It helps police solve crimes." 

But how many?  Is it worth the cost of all those license plates?