Month: February 2016

“German nobleman sued in NY court for $2.5M in unpaid child support” is a New York Post story illustrating the importance of venue. From my NBAA report:

[from a German] “If you open a German tabloid in any typical week you’ll read about a woman who divorced her rich husband and was so upset about the end of the marriage that she had to move with the kids to New York or Los Angeles. Really it is about trying to get a U.S. court to take over and order child support at U.S. rates.” (maximum child support revenue in Germany is much less than what can be earned from working a W2-style job); [from a European immigrant to the U.S.]

The plaintiff here seems to following what was described as the standard script:

Nathalie [von Bismarck], 45, who fled Europe last year to escape her ex, refuses to give her New York address in the suit, saying that she “fears for her physical safety.”

She got an order of protection in December, preventing Carl-Eduard, 51, from seeing or even contacting their son Alexei, 9, and daughter Grace, 6.

A couple of interesting points: (1) the plaintiff here is keeping her defendant’s last name, despite the fact she is afraid of him and that her children would be in danger if they were to be contacted by him, (2) child support is critical to “a life of continued leisure for the [adult] countess: ‘The wife is not obliged to care for her own needs by taking up gainful employment.'”

Related:

• “Do all German women now qualify for refugee status in the U.S.?” (quote from a German: “it is a lot easier to work your pussy in the U.S. than in Germany.”)

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The on-slopes restaurants in Beaver Creek do a lively lunchtime business in alcohol. The most enthusiast consumers of beer, wine, and mixed drinks seem to be European. In other words, they’ve come from sea level, are drinking at 10,000′ above sea level, and will take the lift up to 11,000′ after drinking. Conventional wisdom (e.g., Wikipedia) is that alcohol and high altitude are a bad combination. Conventional wisdom is that alcohol does not contribute to coordination and quick reaction times, like you would need to ski down a black diamond trail. Yet one can observe hundreds of people at just one ski resort lunch spot loading up on alcohol and then getting on the lift.

Readers: How did it become common for people who aren’t acclimated to high altitude to mix alcohol and and skiing? And, for those who actually have tried this, how does alcohol affect your ski performance?

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Barack Obama, our Nobel Peace Laureate, has a new plan to shut down the military prison in Guantánamo. If you’re wondering what it is like day-to-day there, Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi is worth reading.

Gourmets need not fear a diet of rice and beans: “[an interrogator] offered me McDonald’s one day, but I refused because I didn’t want to owe him anything.”

Who is Mr. Slahi? It turns out that he is an admitted Jihadi:

In Germany, Mohamedou pursued a degree in electrical engineering, with an eye toward a career in telecom and computers, but he interrupted his studies to participate in a cause that was drawing young men from around the world: the insurgency against the communist-led government in Afghanistan. There were no restrictions or prohibitions on such activities in those days, and young men like Mohamedou made the trip openly; it was a cause that the West, and the United States in particular, actively supported. To join the fight required training, so in early 1991 Mohamedou attended the al-Farouq training camp near Khost for seven weeks and swore a loyalty oath to al-Qaeda, the camp’s operators. Mohamedou returned to his studies after the training, but in early 1992, with the communist government on the verge of collapsing, he went back to Afghanistan. He joined a unit commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani that was laying siege to the city of Gardez, which fell with little resistance three weeks after Mohamedou arrived. Kabul fell soon thereafter, and as Mohamedou explained at the CSRT hearing, the cause quickly turned murky:

But he does not want to fight coreligionists:

Right after the break down of [the] Communists, the Mujahiden themselves started to wage Jihad against themselves, to see who would be in power; the different factions began to fight against each other. I decided to go back because I didn’t want to fight against other Muslims, and found no reason why; nor today did I see a reason to fight to see who could be president or vice-president. My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion.

And, though many of his friends and associates were Al Qaeda members, he says that he did not take any practical steps to wage Jihad against the U.S. or Americans.

Canadians and Americans are unable to understand or appreciate any of these distinctions:

In 1998, Mohamedou and his wife traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj. That same year, unable to secure permanent residency in Germany, Mohamedou followed a college friend’s recommendation and applied for landed immigrant status in Canada, and in November 1999 he moved to Montreal. He lived for a time with his former classmate and then at Montreal’s large al Sunnah mosque, where, as a hafiz, or someone who has memorized the Koran, he was invited to lead Ramadan prayers when the imam was traveling. Less than a month after he arrived in Montreal, an Algerian immigrant and al-Qaeda member named Ahmed Ressam was arrested entering the United States with a car laden with explosives and a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day, as part of what became known as the Millennium Plot.

Ressam’s arrest sparked a major investigation of the Muslim immigrant community in Montreal, and the al Sunnah mosque community in particular, and for the first time in his life, Mohamedou was questioned about possible terrorist connections.

Back in Mauritania, Mohamedou’s family was alarmed. “ ‘What are you doing in Canada?’ ” he recalled them asking. “I said nothing but look[ing] for a job. And my family decided I needed to get back to Mauritania because this guy must be in a very bad environment and we want to save him.” His now ex-wife telephoned on behalf of the family to report that his mother was sick.

I didn’t like this life in Canada, I couldn’t enjoy my freedom and being watched is not very good. I hated Canada and I said the work is very hard here. I took off on Friday, 21 January 2000; I took a flight from Montreal to Brussels, then to Dakar.

Americans spent a lot of time, energy, and tax dollars interrogating this Mauritanian regarding his involvement in Ahmed Ressam’s Millennium Plot, but the dates never made sense since the two hadn’t been in the same place at the same time. The book doesn’t give the government’s side of the story, but a federal judge heard both sides and ordered him freed after nine years. The New York Daily News didn’t have Donald Trump, Candidate to kick around at the time (“I’m with Stupid” cover) and hence turned its attention to this Jihadi:

The lead editorial in the New York Daily News on March 23, 2010, was titled “Keep the Cell Door Shut: Appeal a Judge’s Outrageous Ruling to Free 9/11 Thug.” The editorial began: It is shocking and true: a federal judge has ordered the release of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, one of the top recruiters for the 9/11 attacks—a man once deemed the highest-value detainee in Guantanamo.

A section of the opinion summarizing the government’s arguments for why Mohamedou must remain in Guantánamo included a footnote that might have surprised the newspaper’s readers: The government also argued at first that Salahi was also detainable under the “aided in 9/11” prong of the AUMF, but it has now abandoned that theory, acknowledging that Salahi probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.

That certainly would make it a stretch to call Mohamedou a “9/11 thug.” It is also a stretch, by any measure, to call a judgment ordering a man freed nine years after he was taken into custody a “rush to release.” But there is a truth at the heart of that Daily News editorial—and much of the press coverage about Mohamedou’s case—and that truth is confusion. Nine years is now thirteen, and the country seems to be no closer to understanding the U.S. government’s case for holding Mohamedou than when Judge Robertson, the one judge who has thoroughly reviewed his case, ordered him released.

Slahi admitted trying to assist fellow Muslims who wanted to kill Russians, e.g., by offering them advice on where to go for training, but the U.S. seems not to have obtained good evidence of him trying to assist Muslims wanting to attack Americans.

Americans’ attempts to understand the enemy are portrayed as comically inept. Slahi was spirited out of Mauritania, imprisoned in Jordan, and then flown to an interrogation prison in Afghanistan. Shortly after arrival he was asked about the whereabouts of top Al Qaeda leaders. He hadn’t even known about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, much less the locations of any Afghanis:

The escort team pulled me blindfolded to a neighboring interrogation room. As soon as I entered the room, several people started to shout and throw heavy things against the wall. In the melee, I could distinguish the following questions: “Where is Mullah Omar?” “Where is Usama Bin Laden?” “Where is Jalaluddin Haqqani?” A very quick analysis went through my brain: the individuals in those questions were leading a country, and now they’re a bunch of fugitives! The interrogators missed a couple of things. First, they had just briefed me about the latest news: Afghanistan is taken over, but the high level people have not been captured. Second, I turned myself in about the time when the war against terrorism started, and since then I have been in a Jordanian prison, literally cut off from the rest of the world. So how am I supposed to know about the U.S. taking over Afghanistan, let alone about its leaders having fled? Not to mention where they are now. I humbly replied, “I don’t know!” “You’re a liar!” shouted one of them in broken Arabic. “No, I’m not lying, I was captured so and so, and I only know Abu Hafs…” I said, in a quick summary of my whole story.

Slahi dug a deep hole for himself by pretending not to recognize Jihadis whom he actually had met.

The next day ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ reserved me in the ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ and showed me two pictures. The first one turned out to be that of ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, who was suspected of having participated in the September 11 attack and who was captured ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​. The second picture was of ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ one of the September 11 hijackers. As to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, I had never heard of him or saw him, and as to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, I figured I’ve seen the guy, but where and when? I had no clue! But I also figured that the guy must be very important because ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ were running fast together to find my link with him.* Under the circumstances, I denied having seen the guy. Look at it, how would it have looked had I said I’d seen this guy, but I don’t know when and where?

If we accept all of Slahi’s story at face value, the conclusion is that once American interrogators knew that he was lying but were unable to determine the extent of the lies, they went into the “lock him up and throw away the key until we have some time to figure this out” mode. Slahi attributes his continued imprisonment, however, to malice against Muslims. To an interpreter: “Aren’t you ashamed to work for these evil people, who arrest your brothers in faith for no reason than being Muslim?”

The book is a good illustration of the costs to American taxpayers of trying to sort out Jihadis and non-Jihadis from a group of people who grew up in cultures that we don’t understand. It also highlights that it isn’t enough simply to sort out those have waged Jihad from those who have not. Americans have set for themselves the task of trying to figure out if a Jihadi was set on fighting Americans or not. How much can this cost and how long can it take? There doesn’t seem to be a limit:

… has there ever, in all of recorded human history, been an interrogation that has gone on, day in and day out, for more than six years? There is nothing an interrogator could say to me that would be new; I’ve heard every variation. Each new interrogator would come up with the most ridiculous theories and lies, but you could tell they were all graduates of the same school: before an interrogator’s mouth opened I knew what he ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ was going to say and why he ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ was saying it.* “I am your new interrogator. I have very long experience doing this job. I was sent especially from Washington D.C. to assess your case.”

(As Slahi is still in Gitmo, the interrogation has now lasted a lot longer than six years.)

No American workplace is complete without motivational signs:

I used to make fun of the signs they put up for the interrogators and the guards to raise their morale, “Honor bound to defend freedom.” I once cited that big sign to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​. “I hate that sign,” ■​■​■​■​ said. “How could you possibly be defending freedom, if you’re taking it away?” I would say.

Slahi sees Americans in close quarters:

the movie Black Hawk Down; … The guards almost went crazy emotionally because they saw many Americans getting shot to death. But they missed that the number of U.S. casualties is negligible compared to the Somalis who were attacked in their own homes. I was just wondering at how narrow-minded human beings can be.

[a guard] used to play video games all the time. I’m terrible when it comes to video games; it’s just not for me. I always told the guards, “Americans are just big babies. In my country it’s not appropriate for somebody my age to sit in front of a console and waste his time playing games.” Indeed, one of the punishments of their civilization is that Americans are addicted to video games.

When I was

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I rode in the back of a Honda Jet on a demo flight recently and wrote up a draft review of the Honda Jet. Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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I’m listening to Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, lectures by Elizabeth Murray. Lecture 10 is titled “Bad Boys of U.S. Politics” and covers forensic methods used during investigations of sexual encounters in which one participant was a prominent politician.

The long list of cases from which Professor Murray was able to draw leads to the following question: Given how many people have run for President this year, why aren’t there any sex scandals? Are politicians behaving differently? Politicians with something to hide not running? The public not caring anymore?

[What does the lecture cover? Professor Murray charts the changing ways in which people profit from sexual encounters with politicians. Carrie Phillips was able to get paid by the Republican Party for keeping quiet about having sex with Warren Harding. Murray points out that Megan Broussard got paid (by the media) for the opposite behavior: disclosing details about Twitter exchanges with Anthony Weiner. Rielle Hunter got an initial $1 million for keeping quiet about having sex with and getting pregnant by John Edwards, then an additional stream of child support payments. (Murray doesn’t cover this, but it seems that having a baby with a politician is more profitable than choosing a sex partner from among the high-income masses. Hunter got paid $500,000 per year initially. She could have gotten that by having sex with a man earning roughly $4 million per year in Massachusetts. However, though Edwards and his wife were pretty rich, they lived in North Carolina. Hunter also lived in North Carolina and presumably had sex with Edwards mostly in North Carolina. According to our interviewee for that state, it is tough for a plaintiff to get more than about $60,000 per year in child support revenue under North Carolina family law. And due to the fact that both the sexual intercourse and the residence were in North Carolina, it would have been tough for Hunter to obtain the jurisdiction of a state where children are more lucrative.) Murray reminds us that the FBI got a blood sample from President Clinton (“Clinton I”?) and used that to do DNA testing on Monica Lewinsky‘s dress… all paid for by us! (see also “Monica Lewinsky’s lost child support profits”) She expresses astonishment that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dalliance with the nanny was covered up for so many years (note that, according to Professor Murray, Arnold didn’t do anything discreditable other than having the affair).]

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I’m a little disappointed that Bernie Sanders hasn’t taken my suggestion to change names to “Bernice Sanders,” identify as a woman, and capture votes from those Americans who wish to see a female president. Despite this, it is time for me to declare my (lukewarm) love for Bernie Sanders for President.

Personally I would prefer for the U.S. to have a market economy along the lines of a Singapore or Hong Kong. Government would consume less than 20 percent of GDP and provide high-quality basic services. This, however, is not what a majority of Americans want. Nor is it what Republicans are actually promising (and in any case, I don’t think that Republicans have any chance to win a national election). Thus I have not educated myself regarding the Republican candidates and don’t have an informed opinion regarding which of them, if any, might make a good President. [The popularity of Donald Trump does not signify the popularity of “Republicans”; Trump was a registered Democrat until recently and many of the ideas that he espouses, e.g., restrictions on trade to increase revenues for domestic companies and increase salaries for domestic workers, are not policies that are typically considered “Republican.” If anything, the popularity of a protectionist Democrat running as a “Republican” shows that support for a market economy is shrinking even among nominally Republican voters.]

If the U.S. cannot have a market economy, what choices do we have? Broadly I think the remaining options are Socialism and Crony Capitalism.

Americans with jobs have a visceral reaction against Socialism because they associate it with other Americans kicking back and living off their labor. Maybe it is a welfare family playing Xbox with friends in a government-provided house while serving chips purchased with food stamps. Maybe it is someone who once had sex with a working American and is now living off child support and/or alimony. These, however, are not essential elements of Socialism. In the former Soviet Union, for example, able-bodied citizens had to work. You couldn’t get paid by the government and/or a court-ordered fellow citizen for having sex, having children, or having been briefly married. You couldn’t be a stay-at-home parent. You couldn’t sit at home collecting Welfare because your skills failed to command a government-set minimum wage. In a Socialist U.S. there could well be a dramatic reduction in the share of GDP allocated to the non-working.

[Example of a conversation that wouldn’t have happened under Socialism: “My sister is thinking about becoming a midwife, but she doesn’t want to study science.”; “We could show her how to make a lot more money [under Massachusetts family law] delivering her own baby.”]

Government bureaucrats allocating resources in a Socialist economy are at least explicitly tasked with doing whatever is in the best interest of a society in the long run. This is distinct from picking winners/cronies in a Crony Capitalist economy where a company might be favored with taxpayer funds because of its connections to a politician.

Let’s consider health care. If we could cut spending on health care from 17.5 percent of the GDP down to a more typical developed country level of 10 percent (or we could dream of cutting down to a smart/rich country’s level of 4.5 percent! (see Singapore in this table)), that would enable us to increase private domestic investment by at least 50 percent (current level is 16.7 percent of GDP). This would provide a bigger boost to GDP growth than almost anything else other than perhaps providing young people with a world class education (see Smartest Kids in the World for why that probably won’t ever happen in the U.S.).

Obamacare, which Hillary Clinton supports, is classic crony capitalism. It costs a fortune. The benefits flow primarily to the health care industry. Nobody cares about the 33 million Americans who end up without insurance. If the goal is to provide health care to residents of the U.S., this is perhaps the least effective and most expensive system that one could possibly design. If you add in the costs of Americans spending time figuring out which policy to buy, figuring out why a claim wasn’t paid, talking to insurers, etc. and the medical billing sub-industry’s costs, it becomes an even more ludicrous self-inflicted wound to our economy.

Bernie, on the other hand, presents the only credible alternative to the crony capitalist world of Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.: socialized medicine to at least a basic standard. (I proposed a slight twist on this in 2009.) At Beaver Creek about half the adults with enough money, leisure time, and vitality to spend a week skiing were in the health care industry, e.g., as doctors, nurses, technicians, or somewhere in admin/ownership/investment (I didn’t meet anyone from a health insurer, though! If they are getting crazy rich from the mountains of paperwork they aren’t spending their dough at Beaver Creek). They all spoke out against Bernie, fearing a dramatic reduction in their incomes should his single-payer system be enacted by Congress.

This alone is, to my mind, sufficient reason to vote for Bernie. Health care is the biggest problem with the U.S. economy and Bernie is the only one who is willing to stand up and say “Stop the madness.”

What about Bernie’s plan for higher tax rates? We’re voting for a president, not a dictator. He would have to make his case for European-circa-1970s tax rates to Congress and they could decide whether to attempt to muddle through with the current system or jump on the “full Socialism” wagon.

Note that I don’t think Bernie’s higher tax rates would product higher tax revenue. My theory is that the combination of local, state, and federal governments is already squeezing as much juice out of the U.S. economy as can be squeezed. Bernie assumes that people won’t respond to economic incentives by changing their behavior. Virtually every paper at the 2015 American Economic Association meeting found the opposite, as did the research cited in The Redistribution Recession. As in the old days of high nominal tax rates, sometimes the behavior change is an elaborate tax shelter (it will be turbocharged in our era due to globalization). Most Americans will respond by working less, though, just as Europeans did in response to their higher tax rates.

What if America became a society like 1970s Sweden or England where it didn’t make sense to work especially hard? That would be a materially poorer society than what we’d have given a market economy, but we’ve already chosen to cut GDP growth in favor of more bureaucracy, regulation, and government (see this CIA list of countries ranked by GDP per capita). But money isn’t everything. If you go to the Vail Valley, of which Beaver Creek is part, you’ll find a large number of Americans who are healthy enough to work, and often highly skilled, but who choose not to work. Some of them saved enough during their working years to have a fancy house but most live in modest two-bedroom condos. All of them enjoy the outdoors, spending time with friends and family, etc. It is a lot easier to build and maintain friendships there than in a place where people work hard. Good luck asking someone in downtown Boston or New York to take the day off to go hiking or skiing! If Bernie’s proposed tax rates get approved then the U.S. as a whole becomes more like the Vail Valley. People will earn enough to get by and spend the rest of their time on activities that research shows are better contributors to happiness than additional income. (Citizens of the Former Soviety Union spent a lot of time with friends, family, literature, etc., since it wasn’t practical to get ahead by working 60-hour weeks.)

Bernie as President means an open debate about what kind of economy and society we want. Hillary as President means back-room deals that quietly siphon off more of America’s GDP into the pockets of cronies.

What if Bernie + Congress = deadlock? That would mean we’d be living under more or less the same federal laws and regulations that we have now. Deadlock means millions of government workers collecting taxes, distributing handouts, and running programs more or less as they have been doing for the past few decades. Is that an emergency? Only for people who don’t think we have enough churn in laws and regulations! Deadlock might produce extra economic growth because American business owners, for the first time in memory, would have some assurance regarding the future legal and regulatory environment.

In summary, given that Republicans are so far out of step with the American majority that they can’t win a national election, and that the only other Democrat candidate is a torch-bearer for Crony Capitalism, I have concluded that President Sanders is our best realistic hope in November.

[Note that I recognize that the thinking of the American voter is typically 180 degrees opposite to mine. Thus the fact that I would choose Bernie over Hillary is to me a confirmation of my 2015 prediction that Hillary was assured of victory. I have certainly seen this among my liberal Facebook friends. Folks who were two years ago demanding a single-payer health care system and for the U.S. to emulate the highest-tax European welfare states are now saying that single-payer can’t work and that the European welfare states are horrifying examples of slow GDP growth. Everything that Bernie advocates is stuff that they were themselves advocating a couple of years ago, but now they’ve changed their mind and are advocating whatever policies Hillary proposes.]

Related:

• “Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right” (the hated rich bastard says “[Bernie] thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field. I agree with him. Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. … The tax code alone contains $1.5 trillion in exemptions and special-interest carve-outs. Anti-competitive regulations cost businesses an additional $1.9 trillion every year. Perversely, this regulatory burden falls hardest on small companies, innovators and the poor, while benefitting many large companies like ours. This unfairly benefits established firms and penalizes new entrants, contributing to a two-tiered society. … That’s why Koch Industries opposes all forms of corporate welfare — even those that benefit us. (The government’s ethanol mandate is a good example. We oppose that mandate, even though we are the fifth-largest ethanol producer in the United States.)”)

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My ski class in Beaver Creek consisted primarily of Southerners who were connected to the healthcare industry, e.g., running addiction clinics, providing radiology treatments, or coordinating nursing care for patients at home. (Radiology in Memphis has its challenges; one patient had to be sent to the local zoo to be weighed prior to treatment.) One gal was from Minnesota. All of us had arrived in Colorado 2-4 days earlier. All of us were feeling weak and dizzy near the top of the mountain (11,000′ above sea level). All of us would be returning home in 2-5 days, i.e., before we’d completely adjusted to the altitude.

That leads to the question… if people are planning a one-week ski vacation that requires getting on an airliner, why not go to Whistler, British Columbia? The base is at 2,200′ above sea level. The peaks are less than 8,000′ above sea level. The resort is a two-hour drive from the international airport, i.e., no farther than Colorado resorts are from the Denver airport. Why does a person who lives at sea level plan a trip to a Colorado or Utah resort where he or she will be guaranteed to struggle with the altitude and not adjust before it is time to return home?

Readers: What’s Whistler like?

[I visited friends who were renting a place in Beaver Creek for two months. Although they were able to ski, they hadn’t adjusted to the altitude even after two weeks and were feeling weak and headache-y.]

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A friend has a child in first grade in the Concord, Massachusetts public schools. This is one of the richest suburbs in the United States and Concord is considered by Massachusetts standards to have excellent schools. Here’s a recent email: “[Johnny] is finishing reading the second Harry Potter book. Below is what he brought home from school today.”

(Child’s name changed.)

• Touring the Mediocrity Factory

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According to “Many are wondering what Camille Cosby is thinking” (Boston Globe), today is supposed to be Camille Cosby’s deposition in litigation regarding her husband Bill Cosby’s sexual encounter with a woman in Pennsylvania back in 2004. Is this a demonstration of the general principle that the best (or only?) way to learn more about two people having sex in Pennsylvania is to ask someone who was sitting at home in rural Massachusetts at the time?

Related:

• Cosby: His Life and Times
• What was supposed to happen between Bill Cosby and the women who are suing him?
• Divorce litigator on the Bill Cosby mess

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“Don’t Privatize Air Traffic Control” is a New York Times editorial from February 15, 2016. The Times argues that the FAA is actually efficient but has been starved for funds: “Congress itself is to blame for some of NextGen’s problems because it has not provided stable funding to the F.A.A. in recent years.” The Times‘s portrait of the FAA as a model of efficiency is hard to square with experience, but a system run by a government crony could surely be far worse (see Amtrak, for example). And in fact the stuff that the FAA currently farms out to contractors seems to be frozen in time (see my NBAA report for how multi-billion-dollar ADS-B weather can’t catch up to 15-year-old XM weather).

Americans are so bad at running bureaucracies that it seems almost certain that any new system for collecting fees will have administrative costs vastly higher than the current system, which at least we know how to run (taxes on airline tickets; taxes on fuel purchased by private aircraft operators).

If Congress wants to change something, I would suggest privatizing aircraft certification so that multiple competing organizations could verify manufacturers’ compliance with regulations. This works well for consumer products. See UL and TUV Rheinland. This can boost the GDP by allowing U.S. aircraft manufacturers to get new and upgraded products to market faster.

If Congress truly can’t resist monkeying with air traffic control, the idea of giving it all to one big unaccountable bureaucracy is the height of madness. The U.S. is already split up into about 20 “centers” (list). Why not split things up so that running the radar in each center (and airports within those centers’ airspace) is contracted out every five years? Separation services (the people on the radio talking to pilots, issuing routes, etc.) would also be contracted out to the lowest qualified bidder every five years within each center. (One issue with privatization is that currently the federal government engages in age-based employment discrimination that would be illegal for a private employer. A controller cannot be hired if over age 30 and must generally retire at age 56.)

I think that we have ample evidence that when there is competition Americans can run things reasonably cost-effectively. If the government takes something over we’ll pay 2-4X the competitive market price (see healthcare, for example!). If the government gives a single private company the exclusive right to do something, there is no limit on how badly taxpayers and consumers can be abused.

Related:

• The CATO Institute buys into this idea, mostly due to the fact that the Canadian monopoly hasn’t ripped off citizens up there

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