Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century. Steve Chapman

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СКАЧАТЬ that you could almost say it had nowhere to go but down.

      It’s tempting to think that tougher treatment of young delinquents finally made them change their ways. Many states have begun prosecuting more and more violent kids as adults and packing them off to prison for long periods of time. But that trend didn’t really get rolling until after youth crime started to fall. And it doesn’t necessarily work: Florida’s ostentatiously fierce approach has left it with a juvenile crime rate 80 percent above the national average.

      California, by contrast, spent the 1990s obstinately refusing to adopt tougher policies against juvenile offenders — leading voters to approve a 2000 ballot initiative mandating a crackdown. What was the price for its habit of shamelessly coddling young criminals over the previous decade? California’s youth crime rate “dropped like a stone,” says Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the 1998 book “American Youth Violence.”

      Obviously something else was going on to steer kids away from violence, and it appears to be part of a bigger trend toward more sensible behavior.

      During the 1990s, teen pregnancy, drinking, smoking and drug use all became less common.

      For all the freedom they have, today’s teenagers show an inclination toward healthy behavior and self-preservation that past generations — their parents, for example — didn’t acquire until they were older.

      We may never know exactly what precipitated this welcome development. But it’s nice to think that maybe we’re doing something right.

Back to the future on gasoline prices

       Sunday, May 5, 2002

      Lots of us have watched “That ’70s Show” — so many that some politicians think we’re eager to live it as well. Americans of a certain age can remember, without great fondness, the energy crisis of that decade. It featured government price controls, claims of obscene profits, and congressional investigations of alleged oil company conspiracies.

      Most people, as they waited in long lines for the chance to buy a few gallons of fuel, learned a lesson about the value of trusting market forces over government regulation. But some forgetful types apparently need a refresher.

      Gasoline prices are on the rise lately. Now, prices of innumerable commodities rise and fall all the time, as you may notice when you visit the produce section of your supermarket. But most prices are not posted in giant numerals at every busy intersection. So many people overreact to any jump in pump prices.

      Since mid-March, the average fee nationally for unleaded regular has risen to $1.39 a gallon — up from $1.11 in February. Painful? Actually, you might consider the current price grounds for cheering. It’s down 30 cents from a year ago.

      There is no cheering, though, on Capitol Hill, where memories are short and demagogues are plentiful. Last week, a Senate investigative subcommittee released a report lamenting the instability of petroleum prices and accusing oil companies of rigging markets to gouge consumers.

      Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Hawaii legislature voted to put controls on pump prices, starting in 2004. It didn’t occur to the lawmakers that one reason the state has the highest gasoline prices in the country is that it has the highest gasoline taxes. Corporate profiteering, bad; government profiteering, good.

      The Senate subcommittee report was proof that, in the words of energy economist Michael Lynch of DRI-WEFA, an economic consulting firm, “if you go on a witch hunt far enough, you’ll find a witch.” It claimed Marathon Ashland Petroleum withheld supplies of reformulated gasoline in 2000 “so as not to depress prices.” The company replied that it produced 33 percent more of the stuff that year than the year before and “sold every drop we made.” The Washington Post noted, “The report found no evidence of antitrust violations or collusion.”

      Never mind that. Among the outrages unearthed by our courageous investigators was an internal Marathon memo from 1998 that said, “Nature stepped in to lend the oil producers a helping hand in the form of Hurricane Georges,” referring to a devastating tropical storm.

      Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who apparently had lived 67 years without ever encountering black humor, pronounced this “an amazing document” and angrily demanded an explanation. A Marathon executive dutifully apologized “that my company would take pleasure in a hurricane.”

      The report, like the Hawaii price caps, is based on the assumption that oil companies have the power to enrich themselves at will by shutting off supplies, driving up prices, and turning motorists upside down to shake all the change out of their pockets. It claims, at the same time, that “the price of gasoline has also become more volatile than ever.”

      But if oil companies are so good at colluding to fleece the consumer, why the volatility? Why can’t they push prices up to the sky and keep them there? Last year, when the price was plunging, the oil barons looked like they couldn’t execute a plot to rob a lemonade stand.

      An industry that enjoys vast market power ought to be a lucrative one. But as the federal Energy Information Administration reports, the return on investment in refining and marketing petroleum averaged a paltry 4 percent in the 1990s.

      How could that be? It might have something to do with the fact that consumers have enjoyed a long stretch of luxuriously low gasoline prices, owing to an abundance of the stuff. Gasoline sells today for about what it did in 1981. If pump prices had just kept pace with inflation over the last two decades, we’d be paying about $2.75 a gallon, not $1.39.

      Our good fortune isn’t an accident. It’s the result of getting the government to butt out. Price controls discouraged production, with the perverse effect that prices rose. When President Reagan got rid of the caps, prices soon began to drop. And though they have jumped up and down on occasion, they have generally stayed low.

      But if we’re tired of having it easy and want to bring back high prices, long lines and energy chaos, we know how to do it. The Hawaii legislature and the Senate subcommittee are off to a good start.

On Internet speech, librarians to the rescue

       Thursday, June 6, 2002

      The people who have advanced the cause of free speech have often been wild, radical or dangerous types — communists, anti-Semites, pornographers, war resisters, flag-burners, and the like. Today, storming the barricades of censorship and rejecting the demands of conformity, we have a different group of firebrands: America’s librarians.

      Your image of a librarian may be a prim spinster whose idea of proper communication is to put a finger to her lips and say, “Shhhh!” This time, though, the librarians’ message to the federal government is: “Don’t you dare shush my patrons!”

      The battle is over government regulation of access to cyberspace. The Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2001 requires all federally funded libraries and schools to install computer filters to block sites offering child pornography, obscenity or anything “harmful to minors.” Noting that the Internet offers a lot of images and text that would make Hugh Hefner blush, our elected representatives decreed that libraries should prevent patrons from seeing such material, inadvertently or by choice.

      This is a worthwhile goal, but in practical terms, the only way to seal off the stuff that falls outside the bounds of free speech is to seal off a lot of stuff Americans have a right to see and produce. That’s why the American Library Association went СКАЧАТЬ