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Who Won in Iowa? And Why? – Article by Daniel Bier

Who Won in Iowa? And Why? – Article by Daniel Bier

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The New Renaissance HatDaniel Bier
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It depends on what was really at stake

On Monday, the political world watched as the early results trickled in from the Iowa caucuses. First, Donald Trump was ahead, then Ted Cruz overtook him, then Marco Rubio started creeping up. In the final count, Cruz won convincingly with 28 percent, Trump came in second with 24 percent, and Rubio took home bronze with 23 percent.

Commentators are scrambling now to read the tea leaves of these results. A lot of the alleged meaning depends on the hopes and expectations people had before. The last (and typically best) Iowa poll, released just two days before the caucuses, had Trump at 28 percent, Cruz at 23 percent, and Rubio at 15 percent.

Trump, it was thought, had run a lazy campaign and had very little grassroots mobilization, so maybe he would get crushed by better organized rivals. And though he did lose to Cruz, and barely beat Rubio, it’s hardly the death blow some hoped. It turns out that at least a quarter of the highly motivated GOP base in Iowa really do like Trump, in spite of his lackadaisical operation, and the polls that show him in the lead aren’t skewed or exaggerated.

Cruz’s triumph, driven by evangelical voters, might seem to bode well for his nomination prospects. Rubio did better than expected, so maybe that means something. Carson, Jeb, and Rand garnered very modest support; the rest of the pack did so poorly they didn’t received any delegates at all, and some are already dropping out.

This week, pollsters will be furiously dialing potential voters. Pundits will be scribbling and shouting, all angling for some unique or authoritative or contrarian perspective on these results.

But there’s one source of information that’s a better predictor of where the wind is blowing than polls, statistical models, or expert forecasts: the market. Specifically, betting markets, where people are forced to put their money where their mouth is.

With hard cash on the line, the incentive to be right is powerful — and, it turns out, pretty effective.

Here’s what the betting odds looked like for most of this endless campaign season. Early on, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but the odds of Trump actually winning the nomination were always consistently low, despite his huge leads in the polls. Bettors didn’t believe voters would really go for him, or that the party insiders would allow him to succeed.

betting-odds-oct-dec

But in the last month, something changed. Maybe it was because the party insiders didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop Trump. Maybe it was because the mainstream never coalesced around a “establishment” candidate. Maybe it was because Trump’s long-predicted crash in the polls never materialized.

Either way, Trump’s odds started steadily improving in January, and Christie, Cruz, and Rubio started slipping. On January 13, at 7:01 AM, Trump took the lead for the first time, and after that, his odds soared. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, bettors put his probability of winning the Republican nomination at over 50 percent.

betting-odds-january

But as the results started trickling in, and it became clear that Cruz would beat Trump, the markets reacted.

In just 90 minutes, Trump’s odds of winning the nomination cratered — falling from over 50 percent to about 25 percent — and Marco Rubio’s soared, from about 30 percent to over 55 percent. As for Cruz’s big win, it barely brought him back to where he stood two weeks ago.

betting-odds-feb

According the markets, Rubio won in Iowa, and Trump lost.

If you’re concerned about the rise of Trump’s fascist, populist demagoguery — its virulent and xenophobic identity politics, economic nationalism, and lawless authoritarianism — this might seem to be good news, of a sort.

But the bad news is that Trump’s loss is probably due in large part to his rival’s embrace of Trumpism. At the Atlantic, Peter Beinart notes that Rubio “surged by borrowing Trump’s message while pledging to more effectively package it.”

In the final weeks before Iowa, Rubio grew markedly more anti-immigration. Having previously warned against using terrorism as a pretext to restrict legal immigration, the Florida senator in mid-January declared that because of the rise of ISIS, “the entire system of legal immigration must now be reexamined for security first and foremost.”

He also followed Trump’s lead on trade, suggesting that he might oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement he had once praised.

Rubio echoed Trump when it came to the rights of Muslims, too. Asked in a January debate about Trump’s call for banning Muslim immigration, Rubio praised the billionaire for having “tapped in to some of that anger that’s out there about this whole issue because this president has consistently underestimated the threat of ISIS.” … The listener who didn’t already know Rubio’s position might well have thought he supports Trump’s plan.

When asked about Trump’s call for closing mosques, Rubio did Trump one better, declaring that, “It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an Internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired.”

… Having once pitched himself as a bridge between the GOP and the changing face of twenty-first century America, Rubio instead began appealing to “all of us who feel out of place in our own country.”

Here is the moderate, establishment candidate calling the whole system of legal immigration into question, attacking foreign trade, fear-mongering about religious minorities, calling to shut down and censor the Internet, and blowing tribalist dog whistles.

Of course, Rubio isn’t Trump: he’s a politician. If he captures the nomination, he’ll try to pivot from identity politics and emphasize his “moderate” credentials. He’s still an establishment figure, with the credibility of being sophisticated, eloquent, and (above all) “electable” — everything Trump isn’t.

But this is the larger problem. Trump has convinced the establishment that they need to embrace his priorities and methods in order to maintain control. Worse, he might be right. This may be the most troubling development in the whole Trump saga, and not just because the establishment won’t flatly repudiate a man conjuring up religious tests, concentration camps, and mass deportation.

By rallying long-suppressed nationalist factions, Trump has shifted the margins of acceptable debate more than any other political figure in recent memory. “Trump has redefined what “moderate” means,” Beinart argues.

In 2008 and 2012, Mitt Romney and John McCain never had to praise a rival for suggesting a religious litmus test for entering the country. During their presidential bids, Romney and McCain both shifted right on illegal immigration. But they didn’t backpedal on their support for legal immigration.

Trump probably couldn’t win the general election, and if he did, he couldn’t institute his agenda effectively without the network of interest groups that make policy happen. That’s what makes him so dangerous: he’s unconstrained by the traditional network of interests, compromises, and pressures of the status quo — nobody has any idea what he might try to do.

But that’s also what makes his candidacy a long shot. The more established candidates might very well win and effectively implement their agenda — pushing the bounds of executive power that Bush and Obama softened into playdough — without triggering an open constitutional or political crisis. Their embrace of Trump’s agenda is a troubling sign both of how the political landscape has shifted and what might now come from even a “moderate” presidency.

The ballots say Cruz won. The markets say it was Rubio. But, in time, we may find that it was Trump after all.

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

What’s Changed Since 2010? – Article by Daniel Bier

What’s Changed Since 2010? – Article by Daniel Bier

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The New Renaissance HatDaniel Bier
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Quite a lot, it turns out

This interesting little table from Goldman Sachs shows a few ways the world changed in the last five years.

Some highlights since 2010:

  • The UN Food Price Index fell by a third.
  • The price of oil fell by two-thirds.
  • Venture capital investments in the US doubled.
  • Global smartphone penetration increased from 19 percent to 75 percent.
  • The cell phone price index fell by over half.
  • Average wages in China rose by more than 50 percent.
  • Beijing air pollution is down by a third.
  • The cost of sequencing a genome fell by 97 percent.
  • The number of summer AirBnB guests increased from 47,000 to 17 million.
  • Bitcoin’s value increased 1,500 fold.

But, as GS points out, 2015 was not all good news:

  • Economic growth has slowed.
  • Life expectancy has not changed much.
  • Africa’s share of global trade remained near 3 percent.
  • The Patriots won the Super Bowl.
  • Japanese GDP per capita remains flat.

Still — on the whole and for most people — things are changing for the better, in more ways than we could ever anticipate.

Here’s to a better today.

(Check out the other data below — lots of amusing and intriguing items.)

chart-11Click on the image for a larger version.

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Good News, Bernie Sanders: Average Workweeks Are Getting Shorter – Article by Chelsea Follett

Good News, Bernie Sanders: Average Workweeks Are Getting Shorter – Article by Chelsea Follett

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The New Renaissance HatChelsea Follett
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Capitalism is letting people choose more leisure

Senator Bernie Sanders recently tweeted the following:

sanders.tweetFortunately, the gruelingly long workweek described by Sanders is not the norm. In fact, leisure time has been on the rise. In 1950, an average U.S. worker worked 1,984 hours a year, or about 38 hours a week. In 2015, an average American worker worked 1,767 hours, or about 34 hours a week.

workhours

That means that the average U.S. worker had 217 more hours for leisure or other pursuits in 2015 than in 1950. That is about 9 days of extra time.

The 50-hour workweek described by Sanders is more common in China, where the average worker worked 2,432 hours in 2015, or around 47 hours a week.

This post first appeared at HumanProgress.org.
Compare other countries over time with their interactive dataset.

Chelsea Follett (Chelsea German) works at the Cato Institute as a Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

America’s Concentration Camps Are a Warning, Not a Model – Article by Gary McGath

America’s Concentration Camps Are a Warning, Not a Model – Article by Gary McGath

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The New Renaissance HatGary McGath
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But some politicians are trying to revive their legacy

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has recently taken a well-deserved beating because of his racial policies. He restored segregation in the federal civil service, and the infamous movie Birth of a Nation highlights his support for the Ku Klux Klan. Those policies are dead today, with very few advocates.

However, a more recent president implemented an even worse race-based policy against Americans, and some politicians say we should emulate it today. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order forcibly removed about 120,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly US citizens, from their homes.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, people feared a Japanese attack on the West Coast, and many regarded the Japanese American population in California as disloyal. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove people from designated military areas.

As explained in Greg Robinson’s By Order of the President, Roosevelt’s language was broad, but everyone understood “any and all persons” to mean Japanese-Americans and “military areas” to mean the West Coast. The removals included “Issei” — resident immigrants — as well as “Nisei” — native-born Americans with Japanese parents. Immigration from Japan had been banned since 1924, and all Japanese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship, although all had been living in America for at least eighteen years.

They were forcibly removed to ten concentration camps. The government officially called them “relocation centers,” but Roosevelt himself used the words “concentration camp” in a recommendation as early as 1936, as did a military proposal in 1942. The occupants were kept behind barbed wire, and armed guards kept them from leaving.

The mass displacement of Japanese-Americans, but not people of German or Italian extraction, was the result of racial rather than security considerations. Roosevelt showed a lifelong hostility toward the Japanese. Robinson states:

FDR had a long and unvaried history of viewing Japanese-Americans in racialized terms, that is, as essentially Japanese in their identity and emotional allegiance, and of expressing hostility toward them on that basis.

In the years before World War I, Roosevelt considered immigration part of the Japanese threat to the West Coast. During the 1920s, when Roosevelt urged better relations with Japan, he supported immigration restriction and legal discrimination in order to deter Japanese-American settlement.

A report commissioned by Congress concluded that

Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions that followed from it — exclusion, detention, the ending of detention and the ending of exclusion — were not founded upon military considerations. The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.

As documented by Thomas Fleming in The New Dealers’ War, Roosevelt proposed removing an even larger number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. The military objected because so many of them were skilled workers who were necessary to the war effort.

The order banning Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was lifted in January of 1945, and the camps were shut down soon afterward. Many returned to find they couldn’t reclaim their property or return to their homes.

These events should be a shameful chapter in America’s past, but even today people cite them as an example to follow. David Bowers, mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, ordered the city government to stop helping Syrian refugees, citing Roosevelt’s internment order as justification.

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative and co-chair of Donald Trump’s state veterans’ coalition, has defended Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration by citing World War II internment: “What he’s saying is no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps.”

Trump has made the connection between his call for banning Muslim immigrants and creating a national registry and FDR’s policies explicit:

What I’m doing is no different than FDR’s solution for German, Italian, Japanese, you know… They stripped them of their naturalization proceedings. They went through a whole list of things; they couldn’t go five miles from their homes. They weren’t allowed to use radios, flashlights. I mean, you know, take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents.

Trump evaded the question of whether he would have supported Japanese internment, saying, “I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.” He wasn’t there, but there are still living Americans who were. One was George Takei, who played Lt. Sulu on Star Trek and was sent off at the age of five. He recalls how it happened:

Without charges, without trial, without due process — the fundamental pillar of our justice system — we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps — prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us — in some of the most desolate places in this country.

For the sake of a false sense of security, the US government ruined countless lives, imprisoned tens of thousands without charges, without even accusation, with only the mere fact of their skin color and ancestry. The internment stoked hatred against a minority group, squandered potential assets in the war, and fueled the Axis’s anti-American propaganda.

The lesson that America’s concentration camps should have burned into our national consciousness that we must never do that again — not to a racial, national, or a religious minority, nor anyone else — no matter how afraid we are. They are a warning, not a model.

Gary McGath is a freelance software engineer living in Nashua, New Hampshire.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

The Hoverboard’s Patent Problem – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The Hoverboard’s Patent Problem – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The New Renaissance HatJeffrey A. Tucker
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Who has the right to make a “hoverboard”?

Shane Chen of Portland, Oregon, owns the patent to one of the hottest holiday gifts this season. It is a kind of hoverboard, a small item that keeps its user upright using infrared sensors, gyroscopes, and motors. You have probably seen them all over your city. You might even have been approached by a street seller.

The authorized version — licensed by Chen himself — is being made and distributed by Razor USA. Prices started at $1,000 and up, but competition from cheap knockoffs, selling for as low as $200, has brought the price for the authorized version to $600. Still, there are places online where you can get them for $200. If experience in new products in a guide to the future, in a year, they will be available for less than $100.

And truly, these knockoffs are everywhere. Small entrepreneurs are importing them from small manufacturers by the thousands and selling them on the streets. They are making and selling so fast that quality control has been… lax. There are anecdotal reports of explosions and sudden acceleration (parodies on this Saturday night live skit). Amazon has refused to sell many brands.

The patent has proven difficult to enforce. Razor is spending up to $1 million per week to sue unauthorized manufactures. It’s a reminder: it’s never enough just own the government-granted monopoly rights to produce something. It always costs money to enforce it. You have to investigate. You have to litigate. You have to win. And by the time that day comes, you might have lost vast market share.

If the product is popular enough, the task is essentially hopeless. The resources and time expended on patent enforcement might instead of gone to innovation and marketing toward actually making profits. Enforcing a monopoly isn’t necessarily the same as making money. Indeed, it is the opposite.

The Case of Eli Whitney
The hoverboard saga brings to mind the history of one of the 19th-century’s most famous inventions: the cotton gin. The holder of the patent was Eli Whitney. A year after his graduation from Yale, he designed and constructed an improvement in the cotton gin — a technology that had existed since the ancient world. He obtained the patent on a single feature, a brush-like extension that improved the way the seeds were extracted from the cotton.

According to Boldrin and Levine, Eli and his partner Phineas Miller has dreams of getting rich with a monopoly pricing scheme. They would install their machines throughout the South and ask a royalty of two fifths, payable in ginned cotton. This prospect seriously annoyed farmers throughout the region, understandably.

So it became a common practice for farmers to reverse engineer the innovation — not a difficult thing to do. Rather than lease the Whitney machine, they would just make their own. Does this violate anyone’s rights? Of course not. A design of a contraption is made scarce and “owned” only by legislation. To forcibly prevent farmers from making their own machines is actually an invasion of their rights.

Still, with the prospect of riches dancing in his head, Eli and Phineas set out to sue every farmer who reverse engineered their design. “Whitney and Miller spent a lot of time and money trying to enforce their patent on the cotton gin, but with little success,” write Boldrin and Levine. “Between 1794 and 1807 they went around the South bringing to court everyone in sight, yet received little compensation for their strenuous efforts.”

Meanwhile, the gin led to vast increases in productivity. The cotton industry boomed. But the holders of the patent became ever poorer.

Fortunately, the story ends well. Whitney learned that suing people is less profitable than actually marketing products. His next project was to invent a machine that created interchangeable parts for muskets. Having learned his lesson, he did not seek a patent for his innovation. He just got busy right away and began selling. (His main customer, as it turns out, became the US Army.)

He finally did strike it big. As Boldrin and Levine summarize the lesson: “It was not as a monopolist of the cotton gin, but rather as the competitive manufacturer of muskets that Whitney finally became rich.”

Will Shane Chen Learn the Lesson?
The hoverboard, like the cotton gin, is in enormous demand. All the government power is the world will not prevent hundreds of manufacturers from making them, driving the price down and down until everyone can afford one. That one million per week that Razor is spending on trying to stop copycats is probably better spent on marketing and innovation — actually selling stuff rather than trying to prevent others from selling stuff.

Absent the government regulation, how can innovators make money? They have the first-mover advantage. This is what provides a period of high profitability before others get in on the act. This is the competitive market at work, inspiring everyone to serve the customer ever more faithfully through lower prices and better products.

Another factor that gives advantage to the innovators is trust. Even now, you can go to the drug store and see name-brand products living alongside store-branded products. Both make money. Both appeal to certain market segments. One producer’s gain does not necessarily come at the expense of other producers, unless the government intervenes.

It is common wisdom to say that the patent system is broken. But what is broken about it? It’s not that the system is abused. It is that it is used at all. Industrial monopolies achieved through government grants of special privileges create waste — and the ongoing lawsuits concerning the hoverboard are a case in point.

Whether it is ginning cotton or zipping around on city sidewalks, a true innovative society encourages as much production and innovation as possible, in service of the masses who love the newest and coolest thing.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. 

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Where Is Speech Most Restricted in America? – Article by George C. Leef

Where Is Speech Most Restricted in America? – Article by George C. Leef

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The New Renaissance HatGeorge C. Leef
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Tolerance of speech and thought is being throttled here first

A good argument can be made that free speech is least safe on private college campuses.

At public universities, the First Amendment applies, thus giving students, faculty members, and everyone else protection against official censorship or punishment for saying things that some people don’t want said.

A splendid example of that was brought to a conclusion earlier this year at Valdosta State University, where the school’s president went on a vendetta against a student who criticized his plans for a new parking structure — and was clobbered in court. (I discussed that case here.)

But the First Amendment does not apply to private colleges and universities because they don’t involve governmental action. Oddly, while all colleges that accept federal student aid money must abide by a vast host of regulations, the Supreme Court ruled in Rendell-Baker v. Kohn that acceptance of such money does not bring them under the umbrella of the First Amendment.

At private colleges, the protection for freedom of speech has to be found (at least, in most states) in the implicit contract the school enters into with each incoming student. Ordinarily, the school holds itself out as guaranteeing certain things about itself and life on campus in its handbook and other materials. If school officials act in ways that depart significantly from the reasonable expectations it created, then the college can be held liable.

As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) puts it, “There is a limit to ‘bait-and-switch’ techniques that promise academic freedom and legal equality but deliver authoritarianism and selective censorship.”

With that legal background in mind, consider a recent case at Colorado College. If Franz Kafka or George Orwell had toyed with a similar plot, they’d probably have rejected it as too far-fetched.

Back in November, a student, Thaddeus Pryor, wrote the following reply to a comment (#blackwomenmatter) on the social media site Yik Yak: “They matter, they’re just not hot.” Another student, offended that someone was not taking things seriously, complained to college officials. After ascertaining that the comment had been written by Pryor, the Dean of Students summoned him to a meeting.

Pryor said that he was just joking. What he did not realize is that there are now many things that must not be joked about on college campuses. Some well-known American comedians have stopped playing on our campuses for exactly that reason, as Clark Conner noted in this Pope Center article.

In a subsequent letter, Pryor was informed by the Senior Associate Dean of Students that his anonymous six word comment violated the school’s policy against Abusive Behavior and Disruption of College Activities.

Did that comment actually abuse anyone? Did it in any way disrupt a college activity?

A reasonable person would say “of course not,” but many college administrators these days are not reasonable. They are social justice apparatchiks, eager to use their power to punish perceived enemies of progress like Thaddeus Pryor.

For having joked in a way that offended the wrong people, Pryor was told that he was suspended from Colorado College until June, 2017. Moreover, he is banned from setting foot on campus during that time. And in the final “pound of flesh” retribution, the school intends to prohibit him from taking any college credits elsewhere.

With FIRE’s able assistance, Pryor is appealing his punishment. Perhaps the college’s attorney will advise the president to back off since its own “Freedom of Expression” policy hardly suggests to students that they will be subject to severe punishment for merely making offensive jokes on a social media site. If the case were to go to trial, there is a strong likelihood that a jury would find Colorado College in breach of contract.

Even if the school retreats from its astounding overreaction to Pryor’s comment, the administration should worry that alums who aren’t happy that their school has fallen under the spell of thought control will stop supporting it.

This incident is emblematic of a widespread problem in American higher education today: administrators think it’s their job to police what is said on campus, even comments on a social media app. Many colleges and universities have vague speech codes and “harassment” policies that invite abuse; those positions tend to attract mandarins who are not scholars and do not value free speech and unfettered debate. They are committed to “progressive” causes and will gladly use their power to silence or punish anyone who doesn’t go along.

American colleges have been suffering through a spate of ugly protests this fall. Among the demands the protesters usually make is that the school mandate “diversity training” for faculty and staff. Instead of that, what most schools really need is tolerance training, with a special emphasis on the importance of free speech. Those who don’t “get it” should be advised to find other employment.

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

How Waze Makes Roads Safer than the Police – How an App Improved My Driving – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

How Waze Makes Roads Safer than the Police – How an App Improved My Driving – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The New Renaissance HatJeffrey A. Tucker
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The app economy has improved our lives in thousands of small ways, with seemingly endless opportunities to download and use gadgets that help us throughout the day, whatever our needs. Most are free or purchasable at a nominal charge.

Forget the ingredients for Shepherd’s Pie? Find it in seconds on the smartphone. Worried about the side effects of a new drug? They are there for you. Not sure about the quality of the restaurant you are about to enter? The crowds are anxious to tell you. Need a burrito for lunch? Uber will bring you one. (You can get a flu shot and a kitty, too.)

The truth is that we live completely different lives than we did ten years ago. We have unprecedented access to all life’s necessities, including medical and nutrition information, mapping information, the weather anywhere, plus hundreds of communication apps that allow text, audio, and video with half the human race, instantly, at no charge.

New Waze of Driving
The app I’m most excited about today is a navigation tool called Waze. It provides mapping, plus delightful instructions on how to get from here to there. But beyond that, it crowdsources information to make the trip more efficient and safer than it otherwise would be. In big cities, Waze will take you through circuitous routes to avoid high traffic areas. It alerts you to accidents, road blocks, and debris on the road.

Impressively, it allows drivers to report where the police are staking out speed traps. It tells you whether the officer in question is visible or hidden. You can also confirm or deny the report.

14627-10326-waze-appstore-l

Police have objected to this feature of the app. Why? Because it means that drivers are better able to avoid getting ticketed. But think about this: the app actually succeeds in causing people to obey the law better by slowing down and being safer, as a way of avoiding fines.

Why would police object? If the whole point of traffic police is to get people to drive more safely, knowing about police presence achieves that goal.

Of course, we all know the real reason. The goal of the police on roads is not to inspire better driving but rather catch people in acts of lawbreaking so that they can collect revenue that funds their department. In other words, the incentives of the police are exactly the opposite of the promised results. Instead of seeking good driving, they are seeking lawbreaking as a means of achieving a different outcome: maximum revenue collection.

The whole ethos of Waze is different. It helps you become aware of your external surroundings, and conscious that other drivers are in a similar situation as you are, just trying to get to their destinations quickly and safely. We are there are help each other.

The Community Matters
For me this effected a big change in the whole way I drive. There is a tendency from your first years of driving to treat other drivers as obstacles. Your goal is to outsmart others who are crowding the road, moving around them quickly and navigating the roads with a chip on your shoulder. If there are no cops around, you drive as fast as possible.

I never intended to drive this way, but now I know that I have been, since I first received my government permission slip to drive. Once behind the wheel, I tended to think of myself as a lone actor.

Waze has subtly changed my outlook on driving. Other drivers become your benefactors because it is they who are reporting on traffic accidents, cars on the side the road, blocked streets, and the presence of police. They are all doing you favors. If you report, others thank you for doing so. You even see icons of evidence that your friends are driving, too.

Safety is priority one. Waze won’t let you type in a new address while you are driving. You have to stop the car before you can do that.

The app manages to create a sense of community out of drivers on the road, and that changes the way you think when you drive. Now I leave Waze on even when I already know the directions. It’s my connection to the community. I find my whole outlook on driving has changed. For the first time in my life, I can honestly say that I’m a safer and more responsible driver.

So thank you Waze — a product of brilliant entrepreneurship, distributed on private networks, performing a public service.

Compare with the people who are charged with the task of making our roads safe and are paid by our tax dollars to do it. Not only do they fail to accomplish what this one free application has done, they are actively seeking to cripple it.

Baby Steps to a Better World
Maybe this seems like too small a life improvement to justify mentioning? Not so. All great steps toward a better world occur at the margin, bit by bit, through trial and error, one innovation at a time. You look back at the progress of a decade and that’s where the awe comes into play.

It is not through large bills written by legislators and signed by presidents that the world improves. It is through small innovations, inauspicious downloads, incremental improvements in our existing paths that gradually build a better world. Waze is only one of a billion but it points to the right method and approach to an improved life.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. 

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.