During a recent tour of Latin America, I met some of the people who are heading or significantly influencing the new governments of the region. Here are some conclusions:

1. The new governments, many of them perceived as leaning toward free markets and the rule of law, have inherited a far worse situation than previously thought. One way to measure this problem is to look at the size of the fiscal deficits and the debt. Argentina’s consolidated deficit amounts to 7 percent of GDP, and although they are aiming for a zero-percent primary deficit in 2019, the servicing of the debt has gone up by 50 percent due to the rise of interest rates in the United States and the traumatic devaluation of the peso. In Ecuador, which has run fiscal deficits for the past ten years, debt-related payments have risen 42 percent. In Brazil, the fiscal deficit has risen 77 percent this year, with debt-servicing payments amounting to 6.2 percent of GDP.

To own something is to have the rights (1) to determine exclusively how it is used, (2) to appropriate exclusively any income or other benefits it yields, and (3) to transfer the foregoing rights to others by sale, gift, or bequest. In this light, it is clear that no one owns a culture, and hence no one may legitimately seek state violence for the defense of such asserted property rights.

One may have preferences about culture. One may have affections for or aversions to a culture or particular elements of a culture. But such preferences do not entail any rights of ownership. Moreover, all cultures are constantly changing to a greater or lesser degree by spontaneous, decentralized processes, including interaction with other cultures. Such interaction has always been the case except for the cultures of people completely isolated from the rest of the world.

To treat the arrival of new members of society who live to some degree in accordance with different cultures as if these persons were “invaders” who threaten to destroy one’s culture is simultaneously to evince little faith in the attractiveness and strength of one’s culture and to seek its defense as the enforcement of property rights where no such rights exist.

Last month, before the misguided Proposition 10 rent control measure failed, the Sacramento City Council voted unanimously to cut many city development fees for qualified affordable housing units. The sewer development fee, the water system development fee and the park development impact fee will all be reduced to zero dollars and this will trim costs from $10,000 to $13,000 per housing unit. The fee reductions are part of a quest to spur more development of affordable units at a faster pace. On that theme, a local example may prove instructive.

Back in 2007, a fire consumed 1,400 feet of a 2,200-foot wooden Union Pacific trestle bridge on a heavily used rail line for consumer goods and passengers alike. The city of Sacramento promptly waved regulations for reconstruction of the trestle in steel and concrete. The fire started on March 15 and Union Pacific crews had the new trestle in place by March 28, so within two weeks people and goods were rolling again. Similarly, if officials want more affordable housing at a faster rate, they must start slashing or eliminating the fees and regulations that bulk up costs, with zoning restrictions as a priority. As Emily Hamilton of the Mercatus Center notes, “when supply constraints prevent new construction in the places where people want to live, only zoning reform can increase access to housing.”

In October 2018, the U.S. government collected more revenue in taxes than any previous October on record. Terence P. Jeffrey of CNSNews reports:

The federal government collected record total tax revenues of $252,692,000,000 in October, the first month of fiscal 2019, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released Tuesday.

Despite the record tax collections, the government still ran a deficit of $100,491,000,000 for the month—because it spent $353,183,000,000.

This October’s record $252,692,000,000 in total tax collections was $11,414,590,000 more than the $241,277,410,000 (in constant October 2018 dollars) that the federal government collected in October 2017, which was the previous record for federal tax collections in October.

In a recent press statement, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced plans to improve and broaden FDA’s Expanded Access Program. Sometimes called the Compassionate Use Program, the Expanded Access Program provides terminally ill patients with access to experimental medications before they are fully approved.

Current proposed changes to the program include streamlining the submission process that physicians undergo to provide required documentation and allowing individuals (instead of the entire board) to approve treatment requests. The agency also previously commissioned an independent review board to assess aspects of the program needing improvement.

The program has had recent success in expanding access. From 2005 to 2014, the FDA provided approximately 9,000 patients with access to experimental drugs. It has granted access to an equal number of patients in the last five years.

Although expansion has improved and the FDA’s commitment to helping the terminally ill is praiseworthy, current access levels are a far cry from what is needed.

Aggregates of voters may swing an election by voting one way or the other or by not voting. But you, amigo, are not an aggregate of voters; you have only one vote. And how you cast that one vote will almost certainly fail to swing any large election. Why this simple reality flies over so many people’s heads is a bit of a mystery (various explanations may be offered), but if you don’t understand it, you really need to stop and think harder about the matter. By doing so, you will independently rediscover the following:

Higgs’s Law of How Much Your Own Vote Matters

A = the state of affairs that will prevail if you vote
B = the state of affairs that will prevail if you don’t vote
A = B

Of course, saying that “your own vote doesn’t matter” is not the same as saying that “voting doesn’t matter,” although the latter may also be true in a different sense (e.g., elections are only rituals, and the deeper system will persist regardless of electoral outcomes).

Hours after Ian David Long murdered 12 people in Thousand Oaks last week, California governor-elect Gavin Newsom pledged to “raise the bar” on gun control when he takes office in January. Outgoing governor Jerry Brown had vetoed “a number of things that I would have not vetoed,” Newsom told reporters. He offered no specifics, but some clues are at hand.

Shooter Ian Long was “deeply troubled,” but “not prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms,” writes Garen Wintemute of the Baker-Teret Chair in Violence Prevention at the University of California, Davis. Wintemute wants to extend prohibition on gun purchases to include misdemeanors such as assault and battery. He also wants to recover firearms from “persons who purchased them legally, but then became prohibited from owning them,” but it may go farther.

Wintemute also heads the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, created in 2016, and funded with a five-year grant of $5 million from Governor Brown’s budget package. The Center’s first project was “a survey that looks at who owns guns, why they own them and how they use firearms.” So the Center, allegedly driven by data, not a policy agenda, wants “the names” of gun owners. As Stephen P. Halbrook showed in Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” the German National Socialists also wanted to know “who owns guns” and ruthlessly suppressed firearm ownership.

In 2016, Jerry Brown signed bills mandating background checks to purchase ammunition and restrictions on the loaning of guns, even to close family members. Look for Gavin Newsom to “raise the bar” on all that while leaving in place new incentives for criminals.

On January 1, 2019, Senate Bill 1391 takes effect. Under this measure, signed by Brown on September 30, any person age 14 to 18 could murder 12 people, face prosecution only in juvenile court “without weighing of factors,” as Yolo County Judge Samuel McAdam notes, and by law serve only until age 25. Under this law, California will be decidedly more dangerous. Under governor Gavin Newsom, law abiding citizens will be less able to defend themselves against violent criminals.

The story of how the U.S. Air Force found a fifty-cent fix for its broken $1,200+ coffee cups is one for the “you’ve got to be kidding me” section in the volumes of examples of how the federal government manages to waste such massive amounts of money each year.

That story begins in the summer of 2018 when Victoria Leoni of the Air Force Times broke the story that the Air Force had spent $32,000 to replace 25 coffee cups whose handles had broken.

When a mobility airman drops a cup of coffee aboard an aircraft, the Air Force can be out $1,220.

Since 2016, the replacement cost for some of the service’s coffee mugs, which can reheat coffee and tea on air refueling tankers, has gone up more than $500 per cup, forcing the service to dish out $32,000 this year for just 25 cups, military.com recently reported.

The 60th Aerial Port Squadron at Travis Air Force Base recently revealed that it has spent nearly $56,000 to replace broken hot cups over the past three years. The culprit, they say, is a faulty plastic handle known to break on impact. Each time a handle breaks, the Air Force is forced to order a whole new cup, as replacement parts are no longer made.

Under the U.S. Constitution, all bills for raising revenue that determine how much Americans will be taxed must originate in the U.S. House of Representatives. By tradition, all appropriation bills that determine how much the U.S. government may spend also originate in the House of Representatives.

That combination of taxing and spending power goes a long way in explaining why the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding now totals in the tens of trillions of dollars, where over the years, the U.S. government has appropriated far more spending than it has proved capable of collecting in taxes.

Since all the taxing and spending that has produced today’s multi-trillion dollar national debt is the result of appropriations and tax bills that started life in the U.S. House of Representatives, I thought it might be interesting to consider the track record of the party that controls the House in contributing to the growth of the nation’s total public debt outstanding in the modern era.

Here’s an unpublished Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal:

To the Editor:

Concerning “Trump Gives Farmers a Jolt of Fuel” (Op-Ed, Oct. 16), it certainly is true that corn farmers and ethanol producers stand to gain from President Trump’s decision to allow year-round sales of E15 motor fuel (corn-based ethanol blended with gasoline). But raising gasoline’s ethanol content to 15 percent—E15 contains 50 percent more ethanol than today’s E10 blend—is costly both for consumers and for the environment.

The so-called Renewable Fuel Standard has outlived its usefulness. At its inception in 2005, the RFS was promoted primarily as a means of reducing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. But we now are on track to become a net oil exporter. Thanks to technological advances that led to the shale revolution and more drilling offshore, U.S. oil production has grown significantly, while imported oil as a share of total domestic oil consumption has fallen sharply.