Read it.

On Friday, the Justice Department announced a “justice AmeriCorps” program that will fund nearly 100 lawyers across 29 cities with one-year grants and stipends so they can represent illegal immigrants who have been flooding into the country and being warehoused, most notably in Texas.

“With the launch of justice AmeriCorps, we’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings – many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking – goes to the core of who we are as a nation.”

According to The New York Times, the $2 million grant will be “distributed to nonprofit organizations in 29 cities,” and federal officials expect nearly 10,000 illegal immigrant children to appear in courts in those cities.

Holder also said the program will “reaffirm our allegiance to the values that have always shaped our pursuit of justice” and “empower new generations of aspiring attorneys and paralegals to serve their country and stand on the front lines of this fight.”

Read it.

These only look at foreign trips, of course, so domestic fund-raising-and-traffic-snarling (and the occasional jaunt to Hawaii to get the girls away from it all) are off the radar. That would make a far more interesting picture.

Read it.

Opponents of Common Core have plenty of ammunition by now: The standards erode local autonomy, are costly to implement, and some experts dispute their rigor.

But an underexplored aspect of this problematic national education reform is the massive financial incentive that certain textbook and standardized test companies have to keep the U.S. on board with it. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss provided a good example of Common Core’s crony corporatist side in a recent article.

Read it.

So, how could a federal agency seize surveillance records local officials are required to maintain? According to the ACLU “a few hours before that appointment, an assistant city attorney sent an email cancelling the meeting on the basis that the U.S. Marshals Service was claiming the records as their own and instructing the local cops not to release them. Their explanation: the Marshals Service had deputized the local officer, and therefore the records were actually the property of the federal government.”

The feds then physically removed the records to an unknown location.

Read it.

A North Carolina woman currently living her dream- to own a salon- could soon shatter and crumble, leaving her employees to pay astronomical costs for health insurance, all because of Obamacare.

Julia Vittorio, owner of Fresh Salon for the past five years, is worried that she will not be able to provide her employees with health insurance.”

“I think you just want the best for your employees. We are a small business and it’s very much like a family, so I care about our staff,” Vittorio told WCNC.

She previously offered her employees health insurance and paid part of it, but has been forced to reconsider her decision because of the rising costs of premiums.

I guess that bit about people saving money on their health insurance was JUST ANOTHER OBAMA LIE.

Mark Steyn looks at the Obamanation.

On Tuesday morning, and later guest-hosting for Rush, I discussed the deeply troubling case of Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator. Nevertheless, Barack Obama decided to honor this man in the Rose Garden, and to embrace his parents. In front of the President and the world, Bergdahl’s father sent greetings to his son in Arabic and Pashto, and began with the words, “In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful…”

This is, to put it at its mildest, odd and unsettling.

Read it.

“He left his weapons and equipment, took minimal supplies, and walked off to either join the Taliban or do something else… The general feeling was that he deserted us and walked off and left us,” Vierkant said.

No wonder Obama values him; they have the same attitude toward the United States.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is creating a $2 million research center to study how the government can “nudge” Americans toward making healthier eating habits.

And if the ‘nudge’ doesn’t work, it will inevitably be followed by the whip.

Remind me again what business is this of government at all, and the Federal government in particular.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

SeaTac, a suburb of Seattle, recently decided to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and United Liberty tells us that employers in SeaTac have had to cut employee benefits to stay in business after the dramatic raise. In an interview with a publisher from Northwestern Asian Weekly, one employee describes how her company had to cut her benefits to counter the skyrocketing cost of wages: “I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation,” she responded. “No more free food,” she added. The wage hike is already hurting Seattle businesses, even though it has not been implemented yet.

Read it.

The report focuses on cities that are building systems that, like heavy rail, have costly, exclusive rights of way yet, like light rail, can’t move more than about 9,000 to 12,000 people per hour. Seattle, for example, is spending well over $600 million per mile building an underground light-rail line that will be able to move no more people than San Diego’s original, 1981 light-rail line that cost just $17 million per mile (in today’s dollars). Honolulu is spending $250 million a mile building an elevated line whose capacity will be little greater than a surface light-rail line.

Yet these are only the most extreme examples of high-cost, low-capacity transit systems. Streetcars qualify: they cost at least half as much to build as light rail yet can carry little more than a fifth as many people. A proposed light-rail line in Austin may qualify: the city wants to spend $100 million per mile building the line yet planners say demand is so low that they expect to run “trains” that are just one-car long.

The real point of the report is that almost all proposed new rail lines are high-cost, low-capacity transit. Double-decker buses can move 18,000 people per hour on city streets, twice what three-car light-rail trains can move; double-decker buses can also move more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane, twice what a subway line can move.

Mark Steyn is upset.

It’s not just Obamacare. In many other areas of life, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of maneuver than Europeans do. If it doesn’t seem like that, it’s because we’ve come up with a more cunning form of statism. In France a third of a century back, Mitterrand nationalized the banks. That’s what socialists do. And people would kick up a fuss if Washington tried anything like that. So instead we’ve wound up with a kind of third-party statism, in which the zombie husks of private industry are conscripted as the front men for de facto nationalization. Except for the check design and debit-card color, it doesn’t make any difference whether you go to the First National Bank of Deadsville, the Deadsville Savings Bank, or the Deadsville Community Bank: The answers are all the same, because they’re all just operating the federal guidelines. It’s like going to the North Deadsville DMV and thinking you’ll get a different answer from the South Deadsville DMV.

Read it.

Last month, as the Senate was busy negotiating the final details of its Ukraine aid package, Majority Leader Harry Reid became temporarily distracted with a campaign finance issue. Since winning re-election in 2010, Reid’s campaign had purchased gifts for supporters and donors from vendors like Bed Bath & Beyond, Amazon, Nordstrom, and the Senate gift shop, among others. But one round of spending was directed to a less recognizable firm: Ryan Elisabeth, a jewelry line.

In 2012 and 2013, the campaign spent $31,267 purchasing gifts from the company, which is owned by Reid’s granddaughter, Ryan Elisabeth Reid. All told, she took in nearly seven times more cash than all vendors of donor gifts combined during that period of time.

Veteran Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston first reported the news after receiving a tip about the expenditures. (Ryan Elisabeth’s last name did not appear on the FEC reports, and the senator’s office initially failed to confirm her identity.) While Sen. Reid does not appear to have broken the law, he understood that the purchases created a perception of favoritism. Lamenting the unwanted attention heaped on his granddaughter, he decided after the news broke that “it would be best to pay for her work out of my own pocket.”

This was not the first time that Reid had mixed family and politics — or potentially run afoul of ethics rules.

Read it.

Hint: No.

Read it.

It would be helpful for the Energy and Commerce and future proceedings to address what are faulty premises of net neutrality:

1. “Market failures” matter, government failures do not exist.
2. Infrastructure companies and content companies are naturally and inherently at odds.
3. Infrastructure companies should not control content; however, content companies, special interests and regulatory bureaucracies like FCC should control infrastructure.
4. Compulsory net neutrality spawns openness; Market impulses do not.
5. Infrastructure companies’ interest lies in withholding rather than selling access. Therefore network competition requires political or regulatory force to exist.
6. Discrimination is bad, and non-discrimination exists; Net neutrality is not itself a form of discrimination or of picking sides
7. Communications flows (video, information, voice, future innovations like holograms) are maximized by preventing property rights in infrastructure.
8. Networks best exist as passive husks; they cannot be a competitive unit. Only the movement of bits from point A to point B on an existing network counts as competition.
9. Wall Street, rivals, advertisers, shareholders, consumers and the media are passive and cannot react to inefficient network management
10. Capital markets cannot be engaged to generate new infrastructure.
11. Neutrality is the highest value: User ownership of grids; liberalization of non-telecom network industries to enable wide-scale, cross-industry infrastructure consortia; “splintering” into and out of the public net by private carriers–all have no role to play on tomorrow’s Internet and may safely be ignored.

Government monopoly worked so well for mail service, telephone service, electrical service, trash service, and trash service, not to mention health care for veterans, that we need to extend crony capitalism regulation to Internet service as well. After all, what could go wrong?

Read it.

The Congressman’s 49-year career was threatened with a sudden ending if he did not make the primary ballot, but Conyers can now breathe a sigh of relief as a federal judge has stepped in to challenge state authorities.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman, an Obama nominee who has only been on the bench for two months, is now insisting that some of the state’s findings are incorrect.

Citing Conyers’s “good intentions,” Judge Leitman said in his Friday afternoon ruling, “There is evidence that their failure to comply with the Registration Statute was the result of good faith mistakes and that they believed they were in compliance with the statute.”

‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ — Luke 16:9

The Crust take care of their own.

Read it. And watch the video. And wonder who might be next.

During World War II, the U.S. government interned tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who had been convicted of no crime. To put a friendly face on the proceedings, the Office of War Information made a film about it. “Neither the Army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea of taking men, women, and children from their homes, their shops, and their farms,” narrator Milton Eisenhower claims. “So the military and civilian agencies alike determined to do the job as a democracy should: with real consideration for the people involved.”

Read it.

‘Hey, we’re tax-eaters, not taxpayers!’

Read it.

Imagine if you could be expelled from your dorm, or a class, just because someone accused you of something — even if the accusation was so weak or thinly-grounded that it never even led to a disciplinary hearing against you, or the complainant was unwilling to even let you have the opportunity to clear your name. Such “interim measures” by colleges seem to be what the Education Department recently required of Tufts University in Massachusetts, as a condition of settling a Title IX investigation against it after it found a student not guilty of sexually assaulting a classmate who denied those charges, after he convinced it that the complainant was not credible and had clearly lied about her medical history. If Tufts didn’t agree to the settlement, the Education Department could have cut off all federal funds to the University — millions of dollars — and all federal financial aid to its students could have been terminated. So the settlement was not exactly voluntary. (Tufts tried to back out of the settlement, but knuckled under due to adverse publicity and the risk of huge financial losses.)

Read it.

Ah, yes, government-provided health care — works every place it’s tried, doesn’t it?

Read it.

Last week a federal appeals court ruled that “exigent circumstances” made it appropriate for Milwaukee police to break into the home of a local gun rights activist without a warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit conceded that the officers may have violated the Fourth Amendment when they forced open a locked container and seized the woman’s handgun. But the court concluded that they were protected by qualified immunity because it was reasonable for them to believe their actions were legal. After all, they were only trying to protect her. From herself. The decision shows how a single contested remark during a psychotherapy session can strip a law-abiding citizen of her Fourth and Second amendment rights. It also shows how emergency exceptions to the warrant requirement that usually applies to home searches have been stretched to encompass situations that cannot reasonably be viewed as emergencies.

Read it.

Sen. Mark Udall is pleading for an extension for billions in subsidies to prop up the wind industry, a fight to protect tax credits utilized by Warren Buffett and one of the Colorado Democrat’s top donors.

And there you have the American system of government in on succinct paragraph.

I’ll make you a bet about those companies who are looking to move overseas to save taxes: None of them are headed by Obama donors.

Read it.

I guess cutting taxes so that firms won’t have a big incentive to leave isn’t an option.

Congressional aides, lawyers and other advisers say talk of corporate exits – known as inversions – is growing, in the wake of several recent deals that have taken major U.S. firms offshore.

‘Inversion’ means ‘escape while there’s still time’. They have to find a name that disguises it’s true nature, like ‘intact dilation and extraction’ in place of ‘partial-birth abortion’, so that they can still feel good about themselves while doing damage.

The U.S. has been hit by a wave of corporate exits in the last few years, as businesses grow impatient with what they regard as antiquated U.S. corporate tax rules, and the slow pace of rewriting them in Congress.

Of course, it’s too much to expect that Congress will do its job and pass laws that promote business rather than punish it.

Recently, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) announced that he will seek to place new restrictions on corporate exits as of May 8, 2014. Mr. Wyden has not drawn a lot of GOP support for his retroactive approach, however, suggesting that the window remains open.

Democrats, the party of punishing people.

The legislation to be unveiled on Tuesday is expected to take several steps to minimize the ability of firms to exit. Those measures also are supported by President Barack Obama. The bill is being sponsored by the influential brothers, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), who is the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Democrats, the party of punishing people. One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime is that they try to keep people from escaping.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Early tests reveal that the Twin Cities’ new light-rail cars require 67 minutes to go the 11 miles from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul for an average speed of 10 miles per hour. Metro Transit managers say they expect to get the time down before the line opens for service on June 14, but the 39 minutes promised on the agency’s web site seems unattainable considering they have added three stops since the line was originally planned. Even 39 minutes is less than 17 mph, hardly a breathtaking speed.

Buses currently do the same trip in a mere 26 minutes. Some people are mildly outraged that the region has spent $100 million per mile to get slower service. Too bad they weren’t outraged when the line was being planned.

Read it.

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

Read it.

Government run health care has come under increased scrutiny as America has learned of the bureaucratic decisions to let patients die rather than receive treatment.

No, this story isn’t about Obamacare, although it does provide a pretty bleak look into the future as the death panels and cost based health decisions come flowing out of Health and Human Services cubicle farms.

This preview is provided by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, a Department which runs the crumbling VA health system.

The VA healthcare system is, in the classic phrase, health care brought to you by the Post Office, and the only good thing one can say about Obamacare is that it isn’t completely run by government bureaucrats.

Read it.

In Daytona Beach, Florida, a couple—Debbie and Chico Jimenez—out of the kindness of their hearts have for the past year on Wednesdays offered full cooked meals to the city’s homeless in Manatee Island park. Over 100 hungry are typically fed.

Naturally, they’ve been fined by the city for it, along with some of their helpers—including a wheelchair-bound man who himself just escaped homelessness. (Maybe this fine can push him back in it! See this previous article from me about how even the pettiest of state fines can ruin lives.)

The crew of criminal philanthropists owe a total of $2,238 in fines.

Read it.

Remind me how this is any business of the Federal government.

Remind me how this is the business of any government, other than perhaps Hitler’s.

Read it.

Who would read a book by a Treasury Secretary who can’t even remember to pay his own taxes? Or so he claimed.

Read it.

Sounds like the perfect Government Job.

A current employee alleges that there is no work for employees to do, so they often sit idly staring at computer screens.

Serco is supposed to process Obamacare applications, input the data into computers, and complete the sign up process, but the employee told KMOV that weeks could pass without an employee processing an application.

Trade ya. In a heartbeat.

Read it.

Man, poor people have it rough in this country.

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The Republican is releasing the list in order to draw attention to one of the defining issues of his political career: pension reform. And, of course, the Democrat he hopes to unseat, Rep. Scott Peters, is on the list.

…

Mr. DeMaio didn’t spare Republicans. Thirty-two of the 102 lawmakers on the list are GOP lawmakers. “I’m not just singling out Democrats here,” Mr. DeMaio said. “This is a bipartisan abuse.”

Good for him.

Read it.

The incredible waste of money involved in Obamacare may not be the most important aspect of the wreckage it causes. Its tyrannical heart is surely the most important. Yet the waste is staggering, and this happens to be only one of its visible elements: “$474M for 4 failed Obamacare exchanges” (Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland).

Read it.

The Antiplanner has a rule: anytime someone mentions how wonderful a transit-oriented development is or will be, just Google the name of that development with the words “tax-increment financing.” So, when Atlantic Cities writer Rebecca Burns breathlessly praises the Atlanta BeltLine as a “magical TOD,” I immediately looked it up.

It turns out the development is expected to eventually receive a modest $1.7 billion in tax-increment financed (TIF) subsidies. Total subsidies will be even more: of the $337 million in subsidies to date, only $120 million are from TIF. That’s not magic; that’s crony capitalism. If you want magic, go to Disneyland, which only cost $17 million (not billion) to build in 1955, which is less than $150 million in today’s dollars. (Disney World cost about $331 million in 1973 which, converted to today’s dollars, is in the ballpark of $1.7 billion–but it was virtually all privately financed.)

Regular readers know that the Antiplanner is not fond of TIF. Though public officials like to portray it as “free money,” in fact it takes money from schools, fire, and other property-tax-supported services. At best, TIF doesn’t stimulate development of an urban area; it only influences where that development will take place and what it will look like. If the development would have taken place anyway–perhaps in another location and at lower densities–then the taxes earned by the development would have gone to schools, etc. if there had been no TIF. At worst, TIF actually slows the growth of an urban area by increasing the tax burden or reducing the quality of urban services.

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Well, it’s not as if he’s going to give them to somebody who could conceivably vote Republican.

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Thus, the Jones Act and the crude oil export ban – each implemented decades ago – together inflate U.S. gasoline prices by as much as 0.22 per gallon – or about 6% of the current price at your local gas station. Not everyone in the United States, however, is harmed. In the case of the Jones Act, the American shipping unions and shipbuilders that benefit from the law have long opposed any type of reforms, regardless of the pains imposed on the American economy and U.S. consumers. The crude oil export restrictions, on the other hand, have found new support from a small group of U.S. refiners who profit handsomely from depressed domestic crude prices and the lack of any legal limits on their exports. As is always the case with protectionism, these groups win and U.S. consumers lose.

Read it.

Democrats and their media enablers openly giggle at the word “Benghazi” now. So funny, isn’t it? Those provincial simpletons at Fox News are still droning on about dead Americans in Benghazi as if anybody but their drooling rubes care about it, ha-ha… If the Democrats are right about that, it doesn’t speak well for the American people. Those four Americans died serving the United States – not Obama, not Clinton, but their fellow Americans. And they’re owed not the mawkish, hollow, self-serving eulogies written by hack staffers for the President and the Secretary of State to read over the coffins, but the truth about how and why they died. It’s odd, even for the insular Obama cultists, that so many people find that a laughing matter.

Read it.

I’ve held Los Lernier in contempt for a long time; it’s good to know that the House is finally catching up.

Read it.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fought against placing al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on the State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reports.

After all, who expects Africans to behave like civilized folks? Not somebody from Arkansas, certainly.

Read it.

Unlike the public, they know something about the subject and aren’t fooled by government lies.

Read it.

Concentrations of wealth and power are what keep liberals awake at night, but just once I’d like to hear a liberal notice, even glancingly, that the biggest unchecked concentration of wealth and power is the government.  Except the government doesn’t directly create much wealth itself (sell off federal assets—go ahead, make my day—and see how little of the total national debt it would actually retire), and increasingly it grabs power by means intended to skirt the consent of the governed, which it then usually uses to confiscate more wealth for itself, or prevent new wealth from being generated.

As mentioned here once before, about 15 years back I recall reading an article in Barron’s about when the FAX machine was first being brought to market, the U.S. Postal Service argued to the FCC that since FAX machines would be used to transmit the equivalent of first class mail, the legal monopoly of the Postal Service to deliver first class mail meant therefore that FAX machines could only be located and operated in Post Offices (for a fee in addition to phone charges, of course). In other words, to send and receive fax, you’d have had to go to a Post Office.  Oh goody.  Fortunately the FCC was not amused at the idea.

Read it.

Alice Gilbert can vividly recall her first day of class last fall in a black studies course called “The Obama Phenomenon” offered by Professor Otis Madison at UC Santa Barbara.

That’s because before his introductory lecture was over, the scholar “warned Ted Cruz-supporting ‘teabaggers’ to get the hell out of his classroom before he sent them home to their mother in a body bag,” Gilbert said in an email interview with The College Fix.

“The comment is from memory, however there were other students with me in the class who can attest to them,” Gilbert said. “When Professor Madison made his comments in the very first lecture, I was taken aback and offended.”

Hm. I don’t know — if you’re trying to learn How To Be Black (and what else could ‘black studies’ be about?), it seems like an effective approach.

Read it.

In Illinois, there is no danger that extra cash will be squandered, because there is no extra cash. But state legislators know you can’t be too careful. So they are considering approving $100 million for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. Without that promise, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan fears, the president might put his monument somewhere else—Hawaii or New York or maybe Nairobi.

Without that promise, of course, Illinois would also save $100 million. A government that already spends and promises well beyond its means has no business taking on any new obligation it can possibly avoid. But if Illinois lawmakers were susceptible to logic or arithmetic, the state would not be insolvent to begin with.

Well, considering that for the next couple hundred years many people will be wanting to know What the fuck was he thinking?, it doesn’t seem excessive.

Read it.

No doubt Jay Carney has an appropriate lie ready.

Read it.

As if.

What happens to an economy when you do just about everything wrong? Say you spend $830 billion on a stimulus stuffed with make-work government-jobs programs and programs to pay people to buy new cars, you borrow $6 trillion, you launch a government-run health-care system that incentivizes businesses not to hire more workers, you raise tax rates on the businesses that hire workers and on the investors that invest in the businesses that hire workers, you print $3 trillion of paper money, you shut down an entire industry (coal), and try to regulate and restrain the one industry that actually is booming (oil and gas).

We made all of these imbecilic moves, and the wonder of it all is that the U.S. economy is growing at all. It’s a tribute to the indestructible Energizer Bunny that is the entrepreneurial U.S. economy that it keeps going and going even with all the obstacles. The problem is it isn’t going very fast. That’s what the Bureau of Economic Analysis told us this week when it reported that the GDP for the first quarter of the year grew an anemic 0.1 percent on an annual basis from January to March. The more meaningful measure of growth, private-sector GDP, rose by a still-meager 0.2 percent.

‘Put not your faith in princes, nor the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.’ — Psalm 146.

Steve Sailer deals with some inconvenient truth.

The brighter folks within the Obama Administration are starting to figure out what I’ve been saying for some time: that a lot of the hype over Big Data and apps and the like are businesses trying to get around traditional regulations, including regulations against discrimination. For example, one of the costs that government imposes on licensed taxi drivers is that they are supposed to drive customers wherever they want. But with the new ride sharing apps, drivers can just look up possible gigs offered on their smartphones and say, “Florence and Normandie? Let me Google that … uh-oh. Re-ject-ed! Ventura and Laurel Canyon? Accepted!”

Back in 1982, my Advanced Marketing Models professor in B-School got to talking about predictive systems used by lenders, insurance companies, and the like. Somebody asked if they really work to identify bad risks. Oh, sure, they really worked, he replied. The problem is that the use of truly powerful predictive factors, like race, have been outlawed and the government is leery of the use of approximate factors like zip code. So they don’t work as well as they did a few years ago. This is a quiet way for the white majority to subsidize the black and brown minority in terms of mortgage defaults, insurance rates, etc.

Read it.

Even Voices of the Crust are waking up to the reality.

No matter what the exact number is, there’s no doubt the percentage of non-paying Obamacare enrollees will be much, much higher than anything private insurers have dealt with in the past. Default rates in that business usually run in the very low single digits. The kind of responsible and engaged people who got their own health insurance in the past tended to also be responsible enough to pay their bills on time. That’s one of the things that made the health insurance self-coverage business so good for so long.

But no one should be surprised by what looks like a serious problem with payments under the ACA. Because the same force that stopped tens of millions of Americans from getting health-care coverage of any kind even before the ACA is still at work now … and you still can’t fix stupid.

Read it.

I think they actually mean ‘more than it already is’.

The Affordable Care Act’s risk corridor program has drawn plenty of criticism from Republicans who have dubbed it a “bailout for insurance companies.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) even introduced a bill to entirely scrap the program, which is intended to offset insurance company losses for selling policies on new exchanges. Now, it turns out, a little-known technical flaw in the law’s language might do that for him.

Unfortunately, the entire program is a ‘technical flaw’.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your stuff.

The Antiplanner points out some inconvenient truth.

It’s been more than three years since much of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by an earthquake, and recovery is far from complete. Now, a new report from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development blames the government for hampering the recovery.

…

This is a familiar tale: after a natural disaster, instead of letting people rebuild, government planners attempt to impose their ideals of what the city should look like on the supposedly blank landscape. The same thing happened in New Orleans: people from New Urban architect Andrés Duany to the free-market Mercatus Center agree that government planners have impeded recovery of that city after Hurricane Katrina.