Couldn’t Help But Notice (010408)
The CHBN covers the forced adoption of energy-efficient lighting, interracial crime reporting, the exclusionary nature of statewide caucuses, and the box-office trend in Hollywood.
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Brian Carney’s OpinionJournal.com op-ed on Wednesday made several great points about the forced adoption of compact fluorescent, Halogena-IR, and other energy-efficient light bulbs, but missed a biggie:
Now it may be that those bulbs are worth more–because they last longer, etc….. (But they) currrently they command all of 5% of the lightbulb market. That means that, whatever value proposition GE and Philips are selling, consumers aren’t buying.
….. What’s remarkable about this bit of market interference is that there is, basically, nothing wrong with the present-day, Edison-style lightbulb. It’s not a lawn dart or a lead-painted toy or a magnet that will perforate your kid’s intestines if he swallows it. It is what it is, and for most people in most applications, it was good enough. So the lightbulb makers and the environmentalists convinced Congress to ban them for no better reason than they believed everyone would be better off with something else.
Note that the lightbulb makers didn’t need a ban to convince consumers to “upgrade.” Microsoft, Dell, Apple and any number of other companies manage to convince the Joneses that they need a better “one”–whatever it is–every few years. If Philips wanted a Halogena-IR bulb in every socket, it had only to put them on the market at a price that made them irresistible compared to the 50-cent bulb of yore.
Bingo. I’ve even suggested that using CFLs is a good idea. But the effective ban on competing incandescents that will take place in stages from 2012 to 2014 should properly seen as a gift to manufacturers who otherwise would have to lower the selling price of their energy-efficient product to entice consumers to change their behavior.
Which gets to the point Carney missed: If “Big Bulb” is going to use government interference to force us to buy their product, we as consumers have a right to know what the marginal fully-loaded cost of producing that product is. I briefly searched for that information, and found nothing.
What if that $3 CFL bulb only costs 50 cents to produce? Can you say “obscene, government-sanctioned profits”? Or are we not allowed to complain about the situation because it has a green, enviro-induced halo around it?
If the manufacturers don’t want to tell us what their costs are, fine. They are welcome to keep their proprietary information private as long as they don’t rely on the government to create the market for their product. Repeal the ban, guys, and you can have all the cost privacy you want.
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Walter Williams, on the impact of biased crime reporting:
According to the 2004 FBI National Crime Victimization Survey, in most instances of interracial crimes, the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. In the case of interracial murder for 2004, where the race of victim and perpetrator is known, more than twice as many whites were murdered by a black than cases of a white murdering a black. The failure of civil rights leaders, people like Jackson and Sharpton, as well as politicians to vocally condemn black-on-white crime — and the relative silence of the news media in reporting it — is not simply a matter of double standards. It’s dangerous, for it contributes to a pile of racial kindling awaiting a racial arsonist to set it ablaze. I can’t think of better recruitment gifts for America’s racists, either white or black.
The bolded stat is true. It means, based on population proportionality, that a white person is about 12 times more likely to be murdered by a black person than a black person is to be murdered by a white.
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I’m not Ted Strickland stumping for a candidate in a caucus state, so I have every right to complain about this. So does Christopher Hitchens.
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Hollywood has had two straight years of barely decent box-office pickups, after three pretty bad years before that:
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 2007’s top five flicks, accounting for over 16% of the year’s gross, were entertainment-oriented and not particularly “message”-oriented.
