Striking a blow for (economic) freedom

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Nearly 2-1/2 years ago we blogged about the legal travails of the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Louisiana with respect to their efforts to construct simple wood caskets and to be able to sell the same to the public as a means of income for the Abbey.

The monks figured there would be a market for the simple hand-crafted caskets in which they had buried their brothers for centuries. Unfortunately, state licesnsing laws designed to protect larger funeral homes/parlors prevented them from doing so.


From PJ Media:

A state licensing law designed to protect funeral directors from competitive forces barred the monks from selling their caskets. The law required that the intrastate purchase of caskets be made only through state-licensed funeral directors at state-licensed funeral homes. This meant: unless the Abbey built or bought a funeral establishment with a layout parlor, a six-casket display room, an arrangement room, embalming facilities, and hired a full-time funeral director who had completed high school, 30 college credit hours, a one-year apprenticeship, and passed a test … the Abbey could not sell its caskets to customers in Louisiana.

The Fifth Circuit has now declared that law to be unconstitutional.

In St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille, the court ruled that the regulations violated both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.

The court ruled that the Louisiana licensing law represented economic favortism in its effective barring of competition in that particular marketplace and that the law did not serve the greater interest of the citizens of Louisiana.

We use the term "rent seeking" from time to time and rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic or political environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.

Not surprisingly, embalmers and funeral directors make up 8 of the 9 members of the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors. Of course, it would serve in their best interests to rig the system in their favor. This is a perfect example of rent seeking where by it is the big dogs in the industry that are writing the laws in a burdensome and onerous fashion that tamps down competition and which force the buying public to pay top dollar (that they may or may not have) for funeral arrangements/proceedings.


The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly saw this case for what it was. This is a victory for the free market and thus a victory for small(er) businesses and the consumer public.


We've said it before but we will be glad to say it again: show us big business and we'll show you big government protection. They really do go hand in hand.

Hopefully, his speaking fee was guaranteed

So, what do Steve Smith of the Carolina Panthers, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Milton Friedman have in common? They are all the objects of unqualified man crushes here at BwD headquarters.

With respect to Friedman, than for no other reason than possessing the stones to say that the physicians of America were part of a competition-restricting monopoly... at the Mayo Clinic!

Friedman explains how government control of licensing of physicians drives up the cost of healthcare and puts the doctors on the spot in this lecture on the eve of Reagan in 1978.



"Would you first mind telling me what other great reforms of government have achieved their objective?"

Friedman frames this against the larger backdrop of moving ever more closely to a fully collectivist society.

H/T: Carpe Diem

Our words-eye view of things*

More than any other athlete in our time, Magic Johnson personified the selflessness and the joie de vivre that was achievable in team sports

B-Daddy has a must-read post on the spiritual nature of athletic competition and the fraternal draw of being part of a team.

Read it here.


On a somewhat related note, our 10 year run with the mighty Raptors of the San Diego Bar Association Basketball League has come to an end. We got the news right before reading B-Daddy's post, which made his points even more relevant. At times, getting geared up on a Monday night to play hoops was percieved as a drag. But win or lose, the highs of extreme physical exertion and the comraderie forged through a commonality of purpose will be things that can never be replicated by anything else we do in life.

* It's proven science that a post improves by 15-20% with a Chick Hearn reference.

Might Stuart have a point?

Doesn't look like comedian turned senator Al Franken is planning a return to NBC's "Saturday Night Live" anytime soon.

In his opening remarks about the proposed Comcast-NBC deal at a hearing held by the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, Franken (D-Minn.) ripped into the deal and the risks it could present to not only consumers but media competition as well.

Franken, who was a regular on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" for years and also had a short-lived sitcom on the network called "Lateline" in the late 1990s, dismissed the claims made by Comcast and NBC Universal that the partnering of the nation's largest broadband and cable provider with the entertainment giant would not harm competitors or the public.

"You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t trust these promises, and that is from experience in this business," Franken snapped.

Franken noted that similar promises were made by NBC when it was supporting the gutting of federal regulations that limited the amount of programming a broadcast network could own. Known as the financial interest and syndication rules, the Federal Communications Commission removed them over a decade ago after years of debate between producers and networks. Getting rid of the so-called fin-syn rules cleared the way for the mergers of Walt Disney and ABC as well as Viacom and CBS.

Here’s what really interests us, though, and has us pulling up a chair to see what goes down. We wonder what public proclamations will be coming out of the White House that is dominated by net-neutral and Fairness Doctrine types given the fact that Jeffrey Immelt, who is the CEO of General Electric which owns NBC, is very chummy with the White House and, in fact, sits on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

But back to the matter at hand. Franken and others are worried that smaller production companies are getting squeezed by media conglomerates who demand part ownership of the intellectual property generated by the production companies in order to get air time. According to linked article, these indies either got swallowed up or went out of business when the aforementioned mergers went down.

Here’s our problem with that, however. Forget over-the-air, traditional network television and hit the “guide” button on your remote. Does that look like a dearth of a) outlets available to the consumer and b) material that is being generated by production companies? Save sports programming, we don’t even watch network television anymore – haven’t in years - as we find no shortage of excellent programming on Discovery, History Channel, PBS, Military Channel, NFL Network, etc.

We can sympathise with Senator Franken who probably knows a few people in the biz who’ve been downsized because of these mergers but we’re really having a tough time grasping how that has choked-out competition when we ponder the several hundred cable channels at our disposal and the explosion in numbers of which seemed to coincide with those mergers of 10-15 years ago.

The shame is not in losing

We wanted to comment on this but got caught up in the excitement of a two-time tax cheat being named our nation’s top tax collector. Could you blame us?

Anyway, back on Jan. 13, the girls’ basketball team from The Covenant School beat the Dallas Academy, 100-0. Since that time the score, the two schools and the The Covenant School coach (well, former coach as he’s since been fired) have gone national and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you've probably heard about this and probably have some sort of opinion regarding the whole brouhaha.

As bad as the score appears, it’s difficult to form any strong opinion on the game itself, and more precisely the conduct of the game unless one is there. True, a 100-0 score would appear to speak for itself, but we would want to witness the mood and tenor of the participants firsthand before laying down any judgements.
One question we do have right off the bat is, if The Covenant School is as good as the readings on this matter say they are and Dallas Academy is a school for kids with “learning disabilities” and with only 4 players on the team as far as we can tell, who’s brilliant idea was it to let this game get scheduled and actually played in the first place?

Back in junior high we were on the winning end of a 123-8 game against a league foe. We don’t recall any feelings getting hurt (true, we were on the winning side but actually being there as a participant afforded us to being attuned to the general attitude of the opposing team) – we had a good team, our shots were falling and the other team stunk. We only suited up 8 guys and the 3 off the bench were no slouches either and they certainly wanted to get their minutes and their shots. It just kind of happened, if 123-8 happens.

But here is what’s important: We don’t recall any hard feelings, humiliation or indignation expressed by the opposing team, their coach or the fans of that team either during or after the game.

A final score in and of itself does not make for humiliation. We’ve never been humiliated merely because we’ve been on the wrong end of a 40 pt. beat-down. The handful of times where we can honestly say we’ve been humiliated or shown-up is when the opposing team started noticeably altering their style of play. When the other team starts clowning or “easing-up” so as to not embarrass you, it has the exact opposite effect. As a competitor, what becomes truly galling and infuriating is when you sense the other team’s patronizing efforts to not make you look so bad. The very thing that has been suggested by some of the talking heads (“just let’m score”) is the only thing that would ever cause us to be humiliated or shamed on the field of play.

Ass-kickings happen.

But now The Covenant School has forfeited the game. Embarrassment. And Dallas Academy has become somewhat of a celebrity… for losing… as Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban has invited the Dallas Academy team to attend a game in his luxury suite. Humiliating.

We think the best for all involved would’ve been to let this game go quietly into the night.