After the headline rate of unemployment (U-3) reached 8.5 percent in December 2011 ( the most recent month reported), some commentators began to talk as if the employment situation is now improving rapidly. Some have gone on to suggest that those of us who have emphasized the role of regime uncertainty in retarding the current recovery are now barking up the wrong tree, if indeed we ever had a valid point. To speak of employment woes as old news, however, is highly premature.

The Labor Department has recently made public its preliminary estimate of nonfarm employment for 2011. I have added the department’s data for previous years, back to 1999, to construct this table.

Employees on nonfarm payrolls, 1999-2011

(annual average, in thousands)

Year Total Private

1999…… 128,993 108,686

2000….. 131,785 110,995

2001…… 131,826 110,708

2002…… 130,341 108,828

2003…… 129,999 108,416

2004…… 131,435 109,814

2005…… 133,703 111,899

2006…… 136,086 114,113

2007…… 137,598 115,380

2008…… 136,790 114,281

2009….. 130,807 108,252

2010…… 129,818 107,337

2011(p).. 131,159 109,080

The good news is that private nonfarm employment has grown since its recent trough in 2010: the increase in 2011 amounted to 1.6 percent. This is not much, but it’s better than continued decline.

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A small-town newspaper (scroll down to Section B after hitting the link) profiled a local land developer, explaining how he started and grew his own business.

Harry Fox, Jr. spent the past few decades becoming a successful land developer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Fox generally does not build but instead acquires large tracts of land and goes through the necessary steps in order to subdivide the land into lots and bring them to market.) He mentioned to the newspaper that if he had tried getting into the land developing business today he would have a much harder time doing so because of all the government regulation that exists. I wanted to know what he meant by this so I contacted him and conducted an interview of my own.

South-central Pennsylvania on a foggy, autumn day. Photograph © Paul Hair, 2011.

I wanted Fox to explain to me all the steps needed to bring a piece of land to market in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. However, government regulations and requirements are so extensive that we couldn’t go through all the steps in just a few hours. So we focused on just one area: what a developer needs to do to bring a piece of land to market with that piece of land having a private septic system. The description that follows pertains only to Pennsylvania. Any errors made are mine and mine alone.

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Dinesh D’Souza once said of Richard Dawkins’ problematic references to history that, “This is what happens when you let a biology major out of the lab.”

D’Souza was on to something, especially judging from a recent Slate article written by famous Harvard biologist and professor Martin Nowak and Harvard postdoctoral fellow David Rand. In it, they explain that America needs “motivation” when it comes to reducing it’s carbon footprint. This article has everything that makes conservatives squirm: love of the Prius, hardcore environmentalism, and longing for absurd government regulation. See for yourself [Caution NSFL - Not Safe For Libertarians]:

This is, after all, the end of the world we are talking about, so why stop there? Why not go full Scarlet Letter? People with more than 2 kids should have to carry signs with them apologizing for over populating our sensitive planet. People who can’t afford $25,000 hybrids, lets call them the “commons”, need to be branded with a “I Cause Cancer” stamp on their forehead.  And if you don’t recycle, Gaia forbid, you should go straight to jail. Wouldn’t that “motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint”?

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America is holding its breath in anticipation for President Obama’s big post-Labor Day jobs plan. September is when Congress is due back in session. It will be then the president will discuss regulations and their damaging effects on job creation. Wait. What? Are we supposed to forget the fact that President Obama has been our president over the last three years? And out of those three years, he had a super majority in Congress for two of them?

So then, what exactly is the regulation industry looking like these days? Booming is your answer.

If the federal government’s regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald’s, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.

[snip]

Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6% (Investor’s Business Daily).

We only need to turn back to last year and move forward to see how comical the president’s new found eagerness is on deregulation.

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The US Postal Service is planning to reduce payroll by 20 percent. That’s a nicer way of saying 20 percent will join the unemployment lines. The Postal Service is citing increasing costs from employees and declining mail volume.

Notably among the costs cited were retirement and healthcare. It was only in 2007 that Congress mandated it pay over $ 5 billion a year into its retiree funds.

ATTLE — The financially strapped U.S. Postal Service is proposing to cut its workforce by 20 percent and to withdraw from the federal health and retirement plans because it believes it could provide benefits at a lower cost.

The layoffs would be achieved in part by breaking labor agreements, a proposal that drew swift fire from postal unions. The plan would require congressional approval but, if successful, could be precedent-setting, with possible ripple effects throughout government. It would also deliver a major blow to the nation’s labor movement.

In a notice informing employees of its proposals — with the headline “Financial crisis calls for significant actions” — the Postal Service said, “We will be insolvent next month due to significant declines in mail volume and retiree health benefit pre-funding costs imposed by Congress.”

During the past four years, the service lost $20 billion, including $8.5 billion in fiscal 2010. Over that period, mail volume dropped by 20 percent.

The Postal Service is not directly financed by the government, and, therefore, must finance itself.

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According to a nonprofit watchdog organization, Corporate Accountability International, Ronald McDonald is an enemy of the state. The grassroots group has assembled 550 health professionals and organizations to denounce the famous clown, the icon of not only the restaurant corporation, but also numerous children’s charities such as Ronald McDonald House.

Ronald McDonald is under fire over a claim that his existence is marketing poor eating habits to children. The organization charges that the fast food giant the clown represents is driving a health epidemic. This accusation comes only months after a mother filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s, asserting that the corporation was “…getting into my kids’ heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat.” This parent, and we might use that term loosely, was supported by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which has been involved in the mandates to add calorie labeling on menus and to remove soda and snack foods from school cafeteria menus. The mother claimed that Happy Meals with toys inside them were too inviting for her kids. This suggests that she could not manage to actually say, “NO,” to them, or take the car keys away from them, when they told her they wanted to eat at McDonald’s. Her goal in her lawsuit: “…I want McDonald’s to stop interfering with my family.” So, let’s get this straight: Ronald McDonald is controlling your kids’ thoughts? Neil Cavuto couldn’t understand this either.

In the mid 1950’s, a social psychology concept called “locus of control” was identified as an important topic in the field of understanding behavior. “Locus of control” concerns the extent to which individuals believe they can control circumstances that affect them. Those with internal locus of control generally believe that events in their lives come about primarily by their own actions, while those with external locus of control tend to attribute their behavior to people, situations, and entities outside of themselves.

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Charles Koch in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Chad Crowe

Years of tremendous overspending by federal, state and local governments have brought us face-to-face with an economic crisis. Federal spending will total at least $3.8 trillion this year—double what it was 10 years ago. And unlike in 2001, when there was a small federal surplus, this year’s projected budget deficit is more than $1.6 trillion.

Several trillions more in debt have been accumulated by state and local governments. States are looking at a combined total of more than $130 billion in budget shortfalls this year. Next year, they will be in even worse shape as most so-called stimulus payments end.

For many years, I, my family and our company have contributed to a variety of intellectual and political causes working to solve these problems. Because of our activism, we’ve been vilified by various groups. Despite this criticism, we’re determined to keep contributing and standing up for those politicians, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who are taking these challenges seriously.

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A video is circulating online that imagines what modifications the infamous California Air Resources Board (CARB) would make to Santa and his traditional reindeer-drawn sleigh if they had the ability to regulate Christmas, with hilarious results:

CARB and the far-fetched ideas they frequently propose are a frequent target of scorn, but they really make it easy.  When it comes to unintentional humor, CARB is the gift that keeps on giving.

Included in CARB’s re-fit of Santa’s sleigh:

•     Changing the sleigh into a bobsled – much more aerodynamic.

•     Ditching the gifts in the back; they’re really cutting into the sleigh’s “miles per hoofbeat.”

•     Red might be Santa’s traditional color, but according to CARB darker colors attract too much heat.  Pale pink is just like red…almost.

•     To reduce horse- (or in this case reindeer-) power, at least four of the Dasher and Prancer crowd would find themselves unemployed come Christmas.

•     Rudolph is allowed to stay on the team, but only if he swaps his glowing red nose for an energy efficient light blub.

•     Santa should really skip the cookies and milk so he can shed a few pounds.

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Next week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is anticipated to try to push through net neutrality regulations in the course of its December 21 meeting.  But as a letter released this week by thirty Republican senators makes clear, key members of the legislative branch are having none of it, and will force a confrontation on the Senate floor if the FCC proceeds.

In the letter, according to the Washington Examiner, Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev., Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, John McCain, R-Ariz., Kit Bond, R-Mo., Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Jim DeMint, R-S.C., James Risch, R-Idaho, Mike Johanns, R-Neb., John Thune, R-S.D., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., Robert Bennett, R-Utah, John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., John Cornyn, R-Texas, David Vitter, R-La., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., Jim Bunning, R-Ky., Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, state that:

[The FCC has] admitted in published statements that the legal justification for imposing these new regulations is questionable and “has a serious risk of failure in court.” It is very clear that Congress has not granted the Commission the specific statutory authority to do what you are proposing. Whether and how the Internet should be regulated is something that America’s elected representatives in Congress, not the Commission, should determine.

Rep. Fred Upton, who is set to take over the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction where net neutrality is concerned, has already signaled his disapproval of the move in a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, which reads in part:

The FCC does not have authority to regulate the Internet, and pursuing net neutrality through Title I or reclassification is wholly unacceptable. Our new majority will use rigorous oversight, hearings and legislation to fight the FCC’s overt power grab.

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Let’s say you have a knack for cutting hair.  If you live in Florida, guess how many hours of government-mandated instruction you’d be forced to sit through before you can become a barber?

1,200.

That’s right, well over a thousand hours.  Plus, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of your classes and pass a written exam.  Only then will the government give you a license—that is, permission to cut hair.

Now what happens if you’re already a successful barber but didn’t have a chance to stop working and jump through all the hoops needed to get that license?

Armed government agents could raid your business and handcuff you in front of your clients. Indeed, this is already happening.  Institute for Justice economic-liberty expert Paul Sherman explains:

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

As many as 14 armed Orange County deputies, including narcotics agents, stormed Strictly Skillz barbershop during business hours on a Saturday in August, handcuffing barbers in front of customers during a busy back-to-school weekend.

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Woah! Radical AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for the left to take control over private industry.

Can we call them “socialists” yet?

“We need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations.”

The AFL-CIO blog reported:

With the economy continuing to stagger and job creation not moving quickly, “working people are justifiably angry and frustrated” as they approach the Nov. 2 elections, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Trumka and Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, Eric Alterman, journalist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and moderator Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation, led a panel discussion—Which Way for the Working Class? Elections 2010 and Beyond—Friday afternoon in New York City.

More than 400 people attended the event at the Great Hall at Cooper Union.

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Abbot Justin Brown and his fellow monks are being threatened with crippling fines and even jail time.  Their crime?  Selling caskets.

Today, they are fighting back in a big way.

In 1889, a group of monks from Indiana fulfilled their dream of establishing a monastery in the Gulf South.  The monastic lifestyle they embody is simple and contemplative.  Their creation, the Saint Joseph Abbey, has had a powerful and positive impact in Louisiana.

For several centuries, monks have supported themselves financially by excelling at common trades such as farming and brewing beer.  The monks at Saint Joseph Abbey have been able to preserve and maintain their quiet lifestyle through farming and harvesting timber.

The monks make simple wooden caskets in which to bury themselves. In the early 1990s, Bishops began requesting the caskets, which led to inquiries from other interested people.  The demand continued to build:   People were eager to share in the monks’ view of the simplicity and unity of life and death through burial in a simple monastic casket.

As Abbot Justin Brown puts it:

The monks of Saint Joseph Abbey have been making caskets for over a hundred years.  People who ask for them want to share in that noble simplicity that our coffins express. We’re not a wealthy monastery and we need the income that Saint Joseph Woodworks could generate for the health care and the education of our own monks.

On November 1, 2007, the monks opened their Saint Joseph Woodworks.  But before they could sell even one casket, they were threatened with crippling fines, jail time and even a lawsuit.

Why?

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The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach.  We proposed in an essay published in The American, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a fifty percent tax credit up to a fixed limit for every taxpayer who purchased any consumer goods anywhere in the United States.

Our theory was that a robust economic recovery would be fueled by increased retail purchases, and that every dollar of cost to the treasury represented a prior retail purchase within the American economy. This, by definition, would have produced an immediate increase in revenues to our struggling business and manufacturing sectors.  That essay and the positive feedback it engendered provided the impetus for the establishment of the Of Thee I Sing 1776 website, the goal of which has been to produce weekly, timely, and hopefully, thought provoking essays.

This week we return to the subject of economic stimulus as more and more politicians from both sides of the aisle and columnists from left to right have pronounced the stimulus a disappointment, at best, and a disaster at worst.  More likely, given the nation’s accumulated debt, the latter may be the more apt description.

So is there a Plan B, so to speak, in the works?  The answer so far, based on bills recently considered and rejected by members of both parties in Congress, is that Mr. Obama would prefer to double down on the discredited Keynesian approach which didn’t work during the great depression and which failed miserably through the recently “ended” (at least by common definition) great recession.  Tell the 9.5% of the workforce who are still unemployed that the recession is over.  Tell that to those who have watched the average time the unemployed are out-of-work grow from six weeks to 12 weeks, to 25 weeks to 35 weeks.

The number of unemployed is essentially the same percentage of people who were unemployed before the Administration and the huge Democratic majority in Congress, in the name of “job creation”, started shoveling our tax money out the door (or as some might say burning it in a bonfire).  And just why won’t President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi wake up and smell the fire that continues to burn?  The answer can be found in two very telling and, now, very familiar utterances of the president and his senior staff in the early days of the new Administration.  The president said he wanted to “fundamentally change America” and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when economic disaster was around the corner, famously said, “Never waste a crisis.”

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Ben Bernanke threw a curveball in his midterm report to Congress this week. The Fed view of the economy has been downgraded since it last reported in February. Although the official Fed forecast for 2010-11 is still 3 to 4 percent real growth, Bernanke sounded particularly gloomy when he characterized the economy as “unusually uncertain.” And he indicated that the majority view of the Fed Board of Governors and Reserve Bank presidents is that the risks to growth are “weighted to the downside.”

But here’s the disconnect. With no inflation and weaker growth, including stubbornly high unemployment, Bernanke mostly talked about an exit strategy that would shrink the Fed’s balance sheet by removing liquidity. This was the Fed’s bias last winter when the recovery looked stronger. Now that the recovery looks weaker, the stock market was hoping to hear Bernanke hint of an easier policy that would increase liquidity if necessary. Didn’t happen.

At the end of two days of testimony, Bernanke’s message seemed to be this: Expect the zero-interest-rate policy to be extended for another year. Futures markets now predict free money until September 2011.

Whether the economic outlook is as downbeat as Bernanke suggests is an interesting question. The vast majority of corporate profit reports for the second quarter show better-than-expected earnings and top-line revenues. In other words, the CEOs are a lot less pessimistic about the future economy than Wall Street or Main Street. And a combination of strong profits, a zero interest rate, and a positively sloped Treasury yield curve would certainly seem to rule out a double-dip recession.

However, one year into recovery, private jobs should be growing much faster and unemployment should be a lot lower. Following a deep recession, economic growth should be closer to 8 percent than 3 percent.

But there are limits to Fed fine-tuning. The central bank can produce more money, but that doesn’t mean it can produce more jobs.

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There’s a new site to add to your blogroll:  Congress Shall Make No Law.

The site, which has the address makenolaw.org, empowers grassroots activists from around the country that are standing up and saying no to unconstitutional attacks on free speech coming in the guise of campaign finance reform.  The site explains all the latest news and events going on in this increasingly complex area of law.  All of the writers are First Amendment attorneys and experts at the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the libertarian law firm dedicated to striking down campaign finance laws in state and federal courts.

The unfortunate reality is this:  Campaign finance laws are a way to regulate speech and silence speakers.  And they have seriously negative impacts on everyday Americans.

Consider Karen Sampson of Parker North, Colorado:

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Should farmers get thrown in jail for 90 days and hit with $1,000 in fines for engaging in free trade?

Unfortunately, that’s the law in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.

And that is why the farmers are fighting back.  Tuesday they rallied [check out the pictures here], coming from around the state to secure their constitutional rights.  Yesterday, the Institute for Justice—the libertarian law firm that defends economic liberty nationwide—took the farmers’ case to federal court.

On December 1, 2009, the city council in Lake Elmo—a rural city just outside St. Paul—decided that it would begin enforcing a law that makes it illegal for farmers to sell products from their own land unless they were grown within Lake Elmo.

The city’s politicians argue that they are protecting Lake Elmo’s rural character.  In fact, they are destroying that character by making it impossible for their farmers to earn an honest living and increasing the likelihood that family farms will fail.

Consider Richard Bergmann.

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News reports last week suggested that 130 companies that cater to main street concerns — like Harley Davidson — had hired lobbyists because of the impact the financial reform legislation will have on their business. The regulatory boondoggle will affect almost every entity that caters to middle class America — from car dealers to dentists. That’s right dentists.

News from Washington is that the group representing America’s dentists are now in freakout mode over the bill. Most dentists offer payment plans. If Johnny need braces, dentists offer payment plans that help the middle class afford them. If the financial reform bill is enacted into law, the federal government would regulate the plans.

This is a prime example of how the legislation — while proporting to regulate Wall Street will actually regulate Main Street.

Yet Citi and Goldman Sachs are supporting the legislation supposedly aimed at them. If Wall Street wants this bill and Main Street is harmed by the bill, how exactly is this Wall Street reform?

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Greece is the fiscally-dysfunctional member of the European Union. On this side of the pond we have California. Illustrating just how bleak the situation is on the Left coast, it was recently reported in the London Telegraph that at JP Morgan Chase’s annual meeting, the banking behemoth’s chairman Jamie Dimon warned that investors should be more concerned about California defaulting than Greece.

In the face of such dire warnings, a $20 billion budget deficit, and the lowest credit rating among all states, one might think righting the state’s financial ship would be the primary focus of legislators in Sacramento, and one would be very wrong to think so.

For a concrete example of just how Golden State legislators are fiddling while Rome burns, take Assembly Bill 1998, now sitting in the California Assembly Committee on Appropriations and scheduled for a hearing on Wednesday. Introduced by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley of Santa Monica, AB 1998 would ban all plastic and paper bags currently provided to customers at grocery stores, pharmacies, convenience stores, and other retailers statewide.

Not only is such legislation a distraction from the real issues facing the state, all evidence indicates that a bag ban is unnecessary, would be ineffective, and may have unintended consequences that create new problems. Legislative language claims that a bag prohibition is necessary to address the environmental burdens imposed by plastic bags. If that is the case, it should be incumbent upon the committee to first prove that a bag ban will not simply reduce plastic bag usage, but will actually reduce litter and improve the environment. Proponents of the bag ban have yet to provide any such evidence. In fact, evidence that a bag ban will provide zero benefit to the environment can be found right in the district of AB 1998 co-author Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco).

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to force a vote on the health care bill this week, and people need to contact their representatives to urge them to vote “No.” This legislation will force tax increases, it will increase the cost of health care and it will force cuts to Medicare benefits. If that wasn’t enough, the House leadership is resorting to procedural tricks to pass legislation that most Americans don’t want. It’s just bad medicine.

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Last month’s nannies pulled a modern-day Footloose by banning singing, dancing and rapping at new bars and restaurants—in Snoop Dog’s home, no less!

But what about this month?

Check out who’s pulling the plug on electric bingo machines (sorry charity fundraisers) and who won’t let pet stores sell dogs and cats (seriously?).

But the Nanny of the Month goes to the heartland pol who’s waging a very real war on fake pot (A.K.A. spice, K2, genie, black mamba, bliss, dragon, Bombay Blue …)

Ladies and gentlemen, we present Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for February 2010: Kansas State Rep. Robert Olson!

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