Local land use regulations allows a gun club to set up 600 m away with competitive shooting days all day for 88 days a year. That is a voluntary self restraint. They could hold shooting competitions every day of the year. The local land use regulations allow the use of guns on rural land. The gun club used this absence of a prohibition on the use of guns in the frequency of use to set up a gun range to fire guns all day long on rural land.
Now here is the rub. There something wrong with the concept of quiet enjoyment of your land if a neighbour can fire off a large amount of noises continuously. The occasional noise, the occasional gunshot yes, but all day? I live near the airport, but I knew it was there when we bought the property and the lands was a little cheaper because of that.
The organic farmers are unusually pristine and prissy about what they want by neighbours to protect the sacredness of their more expensive snob food. I’m not too sure whether they would want to grant their neighbours an equal right to unusual land uses such as opening a gun range. That said, the organic farmers do have a point about a very noisy neighbouring land use that can be heard some distance away.
The organic farmers, of course, could have negotiated with their neighbours for covenants to restrict land use that undermine there are unusually pristine requirements for quiet enjoyment of their land and their neighbours land too. Easy to do when the land is first unused, but once economic activity accumulates, not so easy in terms of transaction costs and hold-outs.
I can’t think of a single fact that this crank got right in this clip on the Trans-Pacific partnership agreement (TPPA).
Robert Reich, a Democratic party hack, referred to the TPPA as the biggest trade deal ever. He ignored a large number of multinational trade deals under the World Trade Organisation and the GATT such as the Uruguay round and the current Doha round.
Reich claims the deal is negotiated in secret and later talks about its submission to the Congress for fast track.
Robert Reich claims that investor state dispute settlement allows challenges to any regulation and compensation for unfair reductions in profits. It is a far narrow criteria than that involving discrimination against foreigners.
Currently, about 3000 international treaties give the ability to sue governments. Some 2700 of these are Bilateral Investment Treaties. The rest are trade treaties, including NAFTA. These treaties have spread rapidly around the world since the 1990s.
The TPP draft chapter says that the point of investment protection has long been “to encourage and promote the flow of investment…as a means to promote economic growth.”
At the same time, the TPP draft chapter specifically highlights “the inherent right to regulate…to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible natural resources, and public morals.”
Robert Reich talks about the Trans Pacific Partnership and its implications especially if it is signed. It would be the largest trade deal in history representing 792 million people and accounting for 40% of the world economy. Well worth a look.
Were the Greenpeace runabouts observing maritime safety rules such as avoiding collisions and giving way? Any protester that behaved like that in a car would be immediately arrested and charged.
Why it is tolerated in the high seas is beyond me when it would never be tolerated on the road. No one would pretend reckless driving was peaceful protest. Is it okay to behave recklessly in a boat? No one would accept that in a car on land.
Activists dangling. Police removed support people on bridge. Huge law enforcement presence in water plus kayactivists pic.twitter.com/vqYGdNH67y
Central to the notion of peaceful protest is fidelity to democracy and the rule of law. The idea is not to impose your will upon others, but to persuade the majority to reconsider their position by showing the passionate extent to which you disagree with them and honestly believe they are mistaken.
The civil disobedient is attempting to appeal to the “sense of justice” of the majority and a willingness to accept arrest is proof of the integrity of the act says Rawls:
…any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act.
Rawls argues that the use or threat of violence is incompatible with a reasoned appeal to fellow citizens to move them to change a law. The actions are not a means of coercing or frightening others into conforming to one’s wishes. That is a breach of the principles of a just society.
No doubt you’ve heard about Walter Palmer, the American dentist who shot the lion, “Cecil,” in Zimbabwe, pushing aside Sir Tim Hunt as the Internet’s Most Hated Person. (Aside from calling Palmer cruel and depraved — even wishing his death by bow and arrow — some are labeling him a sociopath, which makes me wonder, are lions now considered members of society? Orgheads?)
I don’t hunt and have no particular emotional attachment to lions, so I find the outrage level bewildering. However, I think this can be a teachable moment. Specifically, there are lessons here about trophy hunting and endangered species. Not surprisingly to anyone who has studied property-rights economics, there is evidence that allowing trophy hunting is a good means of protecting endangered species. This is a version of the general argument that defining and enforcing property rights in scarce resources, including wildlife, provides incentives…
Jane Kelsey in a television interview said she opposes the reductions in sovereignty in trade agreements that result from investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions because they limit the democratic choices of future governments.
If so, she must oppose environmental and labour standards in trade agreements and, more importantly, binding the hands of future governments with climate treaties. All international treaties are about restrictions on sovereignty.
Environmental and labour clauses in trade agreements and climate treaties all limit the powers of governments to legislate on environmental and employment law in accordance with the will of the people as expressed in the most recent election and change of government. Power to the people.
Jane Kelsey would do better focusing on those parts of the TPPA deal that lowers the net value of the deal such as those extending the term of patents over the drugs. All international treaties are about trade-offs.
The most important reason for focusing on intellectual property law in trade agreements is Kelsey is likely to actually win people over that are not on the far left, including many on the right of politics over to her cause. Kelsey is too busy rounding up the usual suspects.
Regulatory harmonisation is advisable only when there are compelling reasons such as the prevention of hazards or technical compatibility of products – do the plugs fit into each other? As Sykes argues:
as a normative matter, harmonization is inferior to a legal system that tolerates regulatory differences subject to legal constraints, and that relies on mutual recognition where appropriate (the exception to this claim being matters of technical compatibility between products).
Related, as a positive manner, harmonization will often lack any political constituency and thus instances of true harmonization will be rare.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Zimbabwe has its ban on lion, leopard and elephant hunting that it imposed after the illegal killing of the beloved “Cecil the Lion” by Minnesota Dentist Walter Palmer. Hunting companies were told that they could start to line up wealthy trophy hunters again for bag the big game. In the meantime, conservationists have come forward to defend trophy hunting as a needed source of revenue for these parks.
No doubt you’ve heard about Walter Palmer, the American dentist who shot the lion, “Cecil,” in Zimbabwe, pushing aside Sir Tim Hunt as the 
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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