And tomorrow is the feast of St. Martin of Tours. I'll spare the list of things that happened/are supposed to happen on the eleventh of November, but, to quote a friend:

God bless Martinmas. God bless our Veterans too.

It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a falling,
That Sir John Græme, in the West Country,
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.

He sent his men down through the town,
To the place where she was dwelling:
“O haste and come to my master dear,
Gin ye be Barbara Allan.”

O hooly, hooly rose she up,
To the place where he was lying,
And when she drew the curtain by,
“Young man, I think you ’re dying.”

“O it ’s I ’m sick, and very, very sick,
And ’t is a’ for Barbara Allan:”
“O the better for me ye ’s never be,
Tho your heart’s blood were a spilling.

“O dinna ye mind, young man,” said she,
“When ye was in the tavern a drinking,
That ye made the healths gae round and round,
And slighted Barbara Allan?”

He turnd his face unto the wall,
And death was with him dealing:
“Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all,
And be kind to Barbara Allan.”

And slowly, slowly raise she up,
And slowly, slowly left him,
And sighing said, she coud not stay,
Since death of life had reft him.

She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell geid,
It cry’d, Woe to Barbara Allan!

“O mother, mother, make my bed!
O make it saft and narrow!
Since my love died for me to-day,
I ’ll die for him to-morrow.”

Doug Lichtman has some very interesting general ruminations on the debate over Google Print. I write only to respond to this piece of the post, however:

Consider, for example, movies. If I make a movie based on your book, and my movie hurts sales of your book, I take it that it is easy to agree that I should have to share some of my movie revenue with you.

Some time ago Raffi and Amber and I blogged our thoughts about the ideal system of public transit (here, here, here, and here). Libertarianish folk that we both are, neither of us got into the dirty questions about whether governments manage mass transit systems well, whether they ought to manage them at all, and if so which governments ought to manage them.

Enter the following:

1: Seattle has voted out their monorail boondoggle.

2: Lior Strahilevitz has some reflections, chiefly that federal money is good for mass transit and that administrative process and direct democracy are bad for it.

3: Geoff Manne has a scathing rejoinder.

4: The comments to Manne's post have produced an all-star lineup-- more thoughts from Manne and Strahilevitz as well as entries by Christine Hurt and Bill Henderson.

A few thoughts of my own-- my dim recollection of some back-of-the-envelope cost/benefit analysis in college was that buses were nearly always superior to trains, even given my own preference for trains and the increased street congestion caused by buses. Trains are incredibly capital-intensive and incredibly inflexible. Bus routes can change with the needs of the neighborhoods.

A sidenote to this result is that while trains pretty much have to be run by the government or a government-sponsored monopoly common-carrier, buses most certainly do not. Taxicabs, jitneys, city buses, and small private bus companies can all run in competition, if the city is willing to let them, which it almost never is. Under current constitutional understandings I am pretty sure that the department of transportation could issue regs pre-empting almost all municipal barriers to competition here, but as a political matter this is unlikely unless somebody accidentally makes me secretary of transportation. No discussion on this score would be complete without a link to Nicole Garnett's piece in the Harvard Journal of Legislation which I previously blogged about here.

So. I tend to agree with Strahilevitz's argument that direct democracy can lead to too many projects being started because they seem "cool!"-- this is probably true of government building projects generally, not just monorails. But the fact that direct democracy eventually leads to shutting the projects down strikes me as a benefit, not a cost. A better idea might be to allow referenda to cancel mass transit projects but not to start them up in the first place.

But I disagree about federal money. Massive amounts of federal money already flow into state and local development coffers because interest on state and local bonds is free from the federal income tax. This operates as a large subsidy of would-be federal-tax dollars to inefficient state and local boondoggles. (A local government project that earns only a 4% actual return beats out a private project that earns 5%, meaning that people are encouraged to chase bad money rather than good.)

I happen to think that we need less federal money to go to silly local monorails rather than more, but in any case if we do send federal money to local projects we ought to be forced to do it in cold cash payments rather than the current back-door.

So in the end I am unwilling to condemn all state involvement in public transportation. The network effects, public good problems, and so on are real. But we should wear our public-choice hats and remember that problems of government monopoly, confused public intervention and captured technocracy are very real, so a system that admits of lots of private competition with the public provision ought to be preferred to one that places all of our hands in one dubious basket. In this case, I think that means that a big network of jitneys, taxis, buses, and shuttles is probably superior to a train system if we are starting from scratch. We aren't, but this still means that in existing cities like Chicago or D.C. or NY we ought to spend more time cracking open the automobile transport market and less time worrying about constructing the Circle Line.

To sum up: I think we should decriminalize jitneys, have more ground transport, eliminate the tax-free-municipal-bond, and revamp referenda for public projects.

I'll open comments.

Linda Greenhouse has a story in the New York Times about yesterday's arguments in the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Georgia about whether the ADA successfully abrogates state sovereign immunity. I was perplexed by this claim, though:

It was the Roberts Court's first encounter with the unfinished business of the Rehnquist Court's federalism revolution, during which the court curbed Congress's power to make federal law binding on the states.

Unlike some other conservativish folks around the law school, I nurse no particular enmity towards France. My grandfather was a frenchman. My first college Thanksgiving was spent in France staring at a painting of Turkey's by Monet. My second college Thanksgiving was spent in France with my then-girlfriend. The best cup of tea I've ever had was at a Parisian Mariage Freres. I eat baguette and camembert, drink burgundy and alsatian rieslings, and continue to nurse dreams of walking the routes de cassoulets.

So I don't feel any glee at the destruction and death (mostly destruction) that is ravaging France. I'm upset that Chirac hasn't acted to do more to stop this-- what, I do not know, but he is the one who runs the place. Or, to quote C.P. Davenport's 1911 Ll.B. thesis at Yale Law School:

The true purpose of good government is not to subject the rights of its individual citizens to the will of an all powerful sovereign, but, on the contrary, to protect the rights of the individual with the keenest jealousy. A failure to so protect the individual against his fellow citizens is anarchy and an unjustifiable trespass upon the citizens rights by the state itself is despotism.

Ross Douthat and occasional guest-blogger Reihan Salam have a piece about the future of conservative politics. My take aligns with Tyler Cowen's: "(Reihan is) a smart guy, but I just don't believe that any political party can be mass-captured by the intelligent and brought around to sanity."