Freespace

How government takes care of precious endangered animals

On Tuesday, [Chinese] state media reported that dozens of tigers and other endangered animals had died of malnutrition over the past two years at the Northern Forest Zoo in the Chinese city of Harbin. Workers, who later leaked the story to the media, buried their bodies in a 3-meter pit to hide the animals from authorities.

The report follows the news in March that 11 rare Siberian tigers had starved to death within a few months at the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo in northeast China. The cases have shed light on the murky world of China's 12 tiger farms, which were initially set up by the state in the 1980s to preserve the numbers of animals in existence.

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Protestors calling the President Hitler

...just one of those things that's gone out of fashion, I guess.

Due process and vague laws

Forbes.com has published my editorial on the Skilling case. More on the case at PLF Liberty Blog.

Decision in Jones v. Harris Associates

The Supreme Court decided Jones v. Harris Associates this morning. I wrote an amicus brief in this case for the Cato Institute.

The case involves a federal statute that imposes a fiduciary duty on investment fund advisors “with respect to compensation.” The plaintiffs sued their investment fund managers on the grounds that they had paid their advisors too much. The Seventh Circuit rejected their argument, holding that the statute only requires fair and open dealing, but does not impose any kind of a reasonableness standard on the amount of pay that an investment company can pay to an advisor. In the brief I wrote, I argued that this was the correct approach—as long as everyone involved in the deal is open and honest with each other, the resulting pay is just and fair, even if it’s a lot.

The decision rejects this approach, and formally adopts the “totality of the circumstances” test applied in the Gartenberg case. It takes a restrained interpretation of the Gartenberg decision—as Justice Thomas points out in his concurring opinion: “today’s decision…does not countenance the free-ranging judicial ‘fairness’ review of fees that Gartenberg could be read to authorize…and that virtually all courts…since Gartenberg…have wisely eschewed.” But, sadly, the decision implies that a company could be liable solely because the compensation amount is very high, even though nobody was dishonest or uninformed: “This is not to deny that a fee may be excessive even if it was negotiated by a board in possession of all relevant information, but such a determination must be based on evidence that the fee ‘is so disproportionately large that it bears no reasonable relationship to the services rendered and could not have been the product of arm’s-length bargaining.’”

What precisely does that mean? How is one to determine whether a person is being paid “disproportionately” even though the bargaining over his salary was perfectly open and honest? The Court does not explain, adopting instead a generalized “totality of the circumstances” approach with no clear lines. The upside is that it seems unlikely that a plaintiff could meet the burden of proof of showing that the advisor’s pay is “outside the range that arm’s-length bargaining would produce” in a case where there was no dishonest bargaining. But the downside is that because it refuses to draw a clear line blocking lawsuits in the absence of evidence of dishonest dealing, today’s decision invites further lawsuits. That raises costs to consumers and investors, and keeps lawyers employed for many years to come.

Comparative advantage is a bitch, ain't it?

As someone who has always found the whole "local food" movement completely asinine to begin with, I find this hilarious. You may not care about supply and demand, but supply and demand care about you!

HT: Tom Palmer, who adds, "Why We Trade."

Featherbedding in L.A.--a reimagined classic

How Los Angeles is hurting working families in order to help labor unions, over at the PLF Liberty Blog.

Calling on Mrs. Chesnut

In Columbia, I stayed at the Chesnut Cottage, where James and Mary Chesnut stayed during their time in the state capital in 1864, and where they entertained Jefferson Davis. Indeed, I stayed in the room where Davis stayed, and in her diary entry for October 7, 1864, Mrs. Chesnut tells how she stood—well, let’s let her tell it (from pp. 649-53 of the Woodward edition):

Calling on Mr. Calhoun

I went this week to South Carolina, where I spoke at Clemson University, on the western part of the state, and then at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and I got to see some exciting sights.

Saturday cat

The use of a time capsule

A great comment on the 30 year anniversary of the "American Stonehenge":

Loris Magnani, an astronomy professor at the University of Georgia, questions how useful the Guidestones would be to survivors of civilization-ending cataclysm. The devices incorporated into the stones are "relatively easy stuff" that most human societies have developed early in their histories, he said.

"Don't get me wrong. As a monument, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with doing that," Magnani told CNN. But he added, "Every decent civilization going back to a couple of millennia before Christ has figured this out. How to make gasoline? Now that would be useful."