Cabs and Cupidity

Immigrant Confronts Entitlement Mentality
Weber County Forum Sunday sermon

By George Will
Deseret Morning News
Via The Washington Post

MINNEAPOLIS — The campaign to deny Luis Paucar his right to economic liberty illustrates the ingenuity people will invest in concocting perverse arguments for novel entitlements. This city's taxi cartel is offering an audacious new rationalization for corporate welfare, asserting a right — a constitutional right, in perpetuity — to revenues it would have received if Minneapolis' City Council had not ended the cartel that never should have existed.

Paucar, 37, embodies the best qualities of American immigrants. He is a splendidly self-sufficient entrepreneur. And he is wielding American principles against some Americans who, in their decadent addiction to government assistance, are trying to litigate themselves to prosperity at the expense of Paucar and the public.

Seventeen years ago Paucar came to America from Ecuador and for five years drove a taxi in New York City. Because that city has long been liberalism's laboratory, many taxi drivers there are akin to, as an economist has said, "modern urban sharecroppers."

In 1937, New York City, full of liberalism's itch to regulate everything, knew, just knew, how many taxicab permits there should be. For 70 years the number (about 12,000) has not been significantly changed, so rising prices have been powerless to create new suppliers of taxi services. Under this government-created scarcity, a permit ("medallion") now costs about $500,000. Most people wealthy enough to buy medallions do not drive cabs, any more than plantation owners picked cotton. They lease their medallions at exorbitant rates to people like Paucar who drive, often for less than $15 an hour, for long days.

Attracted by Minneapolis-St. Paul's vibrant Hispanic community, now 130,000 strong, Paucar moved here, assuming that economic liberty would be more spacious than in New York. Unfortunately, Minnesota has a "progressive," meaning statist, tradition that can impede the progress of people like Paucar but who lack his knack for fighting back.

The regulatory impulse came to the upper Midwest with immigrants from Northern Europe, many of whom carried the too-much-government traditions of "social democracy." In the 1940s, under a mayor who soon would take his New Deal liberalism to Washington — Hubert Humphrey — the city capped entry into the taxi business.

By the time Paucar got here in 1999, 343 taxis were permitted. He wanted to launch a fleet of 15. That would have required him to find 15 incumbent license-holders willing to sell their licenses for up to $25,000 apiece.

As a byproduct of government intervention, a secondary market arose in which government-conferred benefits were traded by the cartel. In 2006, Minneapolis had only one cab for every 1,000 residents (compared to three times as many in St. Louis and Boston), which was especially punishing to the poor who lack cars.

That fact — and Paucar's determination and, eventually, litigiousness; he is a real American — helped persuade the City Council members, liberals all (12 members of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, one member of the Green Party), to vote to allow 45 new cabs per year until 2010, at which point the cap will disappear. In response, the cartel is asking a federal court to say the cartel's constitutional rights have been violated. It says the cap — a barrier to entry into the taxi business — constituted an entitlement to profits that now are being "taken" by government action.

The Constitution's Fifth Amendment says no property shall be "taken" without just compensation. The concept of an injury through "regulatory taking" is familiar and defensible: Such an injury occurs when a government regulation reduces the value of property by restricting its use. But the taxi cartel is claiming a deregulatory taking: It wants compensation because it now faces unanticipated competition.

When the incumbent taxi industry inveigled the city government into creating the cartel, this was a textbook example of rent-seeking — getting government to confer advantages on an economic faction in order to disadvantage actual or potential competitors. If the cartel's argument about a "deregulatory taking" were to prevail, modern government — the regulatory state — would be controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet: Governments could never deregulate, never undo the damage that they enable rent-seekers to do.

By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today's entitlement mentality would leave.

George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com. Washington Post Writers Group

© 2007 Deseret News Publishing Company

Invitation to an Olde-fashioned WCF Brawl

The Marquess of Queensbury rules will be in effect

It never ceases to amaze us to observe how every discussion thread develops a life of its own, here at Weber County Forum.

What started out as just another ho-hum garden-variety expose of yet another Boss Godfrey prevarication in yesterday's article, has now carromed off into a heated discussion on the topic of illegal immigration.

While we're tempted to avoid the conversation altogether (we have gentle and delicate sensibilities, after all,) we're going to temp fate, throw a little more fuel on the fire, start a new thread and link a Standard-Examiner Op-Ed piece which appeared in this morning's edition:

The Day Without Farm Workers

We believe that the "illegal immigration issue" is highly nuanced, and that the above article reveals one chink in the armor of those who would opt for draconian police state action against the 12-20 million illegals who've unlawfully crossed our borders, and attempted to live "the American Dream."

We also believe this article reveals one of the practical nuances which argues against neat & clever solutions to the "illegal alien problem."

Do you like peaches that have the taste and texture of cardboard? That's the fundamental question that Farmer Masumoto asks of us.

What do our gentle readers think about this?

Make your arguments and post your links, gentle readers. We know this is a hot-button topic for many of you.

We may decide to move a few of your comments from the previous thread here, just to kickstart this discussion, BTW.

Please promise though, as you enter into this potentially inflammatory invited discussion, that you'll all kiss and make up in the morning -- Smooch!

Update 5/19/07 10:36 a.m. MT: At risk of further stirring the pot, we post an interesting article on the proposed "immigration reform" bill at Townhall.com, where there's a very lively reader discussion in progress.

Mormon Portion of Utah Population Steadily Shrinking

The Salt Lake Tribune had an interesting article in today's edition, describing a unique wrinkle in Utah demographics. According this Matt Canham report, the Mormon portion of Utah population is steadily shrinking, and within the next three years, the Mormon share of Utah's population is expected to hit its lowest level since The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started keeping membership numbers:

On this day, 158 years ago, Brigham Young and his band of pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, starting a migration that quickly turned Utah into a Mormon-dominated desert realm.
That domination - at least in terms of raw numbers - appears to be nearing its end.
Within the next three years, the Mormon share of Utah's population is expected to hit its lowest level since The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started keeping membership numbers. And if current trends continue, LDS residents no longer will constitute a majority by 2030.
These projections are based on normally secret membership counts the LDS Church voluntarily hands over to Utah's Office of Planning and Budget, under what it assumed was a binding confidentiality agreement. The state planning office uses the county-by-county numbers to help estimate future population growth.
Through a public records request, The Salt Lake Tribune obtained the data from 1989 to 2004. State employees believe the LDS Church has provided the records since at least the 1960s but could retrieve only the numbers for 15 years and found no such confidentiality agreement.
Still, these 15 years are enough to identify a historic transformation in the makeup of Utah's ever-growing population.
Stated simply: "Utah is essentially becoming more like the nation," said Robert Spendlove, the planning office's lead demographer.

You can read the full article here.

This raises some interesting questions, as the State of Utah aggressively recruits out-of state corporations, and considers abolition of the state corporate income tax, among other things. Although the planning office's lead demographer projects a "slow shift," such a projection fails to take into account, it seems to me, the sudden effect of corporate-related immigration, if Governor Hunstman's administration substantially succeeds in luring out-of-state companies to Utah, with a more manufacturing-friendly -- and generally business-friendly -- economic environment.

What say our gentle Weber County Forum readers? Will an influx of skilled workers and executives to Utah in the next few years accelerate the pace of Utah's already-documented demographic shift? How will this shift effect the local political climate? Is this really about mere Republican-Democrat politics, as the article suggests; or will these inevitable changes be more fundamental, and go beyond mere partisan party politics? How will these changes effect our unique local culture, and the manner in which politics are presently conducted in the State of Utah?

Comments?

Homeland Insecurity - Patriots or Xenophobes?

There's a firebrand political group that's arisen in the western United States recently. Calling themselves "The Minuteman Project," this group garnered national media attention early in 2005, when it organized and activated volunteer citizen patrols, to assist the US Border Patrol in preventing illegal immigration along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Predictably, this group has created quite a stir in the American southwest, and indeed even south of the border. For those who are unfamiliar with this group, you can read more about them here, here, and here. Surprise of surprises, there also seems to be at least one "official website", which seeks volunteers and solicits donations.

Until now, It had appeared that this group's activities were confined to those areas of the United States adjacent to the Mexican border. That's apparently not quite the case however. According to Salt Lake City Weekly, the group has been quite active (and politically effective) in Utah, too. As today's City Weekly reports this morning, this group (or an affiliate) may have been effective in lobbying for recently-enacted Utah legislation which could be fairly-characterized as "anti-immigrant." This is a fascinating wrinkle in the local political landscape, I think; and it's something that seems to have been ignored by the establishment Utah print and broadcast media. For those interested in the issue you can read the City Weekly article here.

This story hasn't entirely gone unnoticed in the the Ogden area however, as City Weekly reports:

El Ogdentino, an Ogden, Spanish-language newspaper, devoted its April issue to minutemen from Utah and elsewhere who traveled to Arizona, concluding in an editorial they were “terroritas-racistas” hiding behind the cause of national security.

“These racist persons believe we Latin Americans are plotting to take over this country. … [that] we are a criminal band and we come to destabilize their well-being,” a newspaper editorial said.

For my own part, I found this City Weekly article to be more than slightly disturbing. What about our gentle Weber County Forum readers though? Do you believe this group are "true patriots," defending our national sovereignty, as these "minutemen" contend? Or are they just the usual tiny group of wacko xenophobes who fear anyone -- and everyone -- who's even a little bit different from them?

Chime in readers! It would be interesting to hear your views on this.