TGIF:

— Will the recession lead to better political science.

— Eric Kleefeld makes a joke.

— The truth about Rick Scott.

— Marty Peretz’s long-winded defense of continued Israeli land grabs.

— Mark McKinnon is making sense.

— Arne Duncan says states should lift their charter caps. He’s right.

You should really watch that Duncan video.

This has nothing to do with Sonia Sotomayor, but parking guru Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking (your must read guide to parking policy), spoke today at a briefing for DC City Council staff. His basic message was, you know, that parking shouldn’t be underpriced and we shouldn’t think of “cheaper” parking as “better” parking.

Listening to him, it occurred to me that it’s weird that this is such a revolutionary concept. When I took economics, we had a little squib in there about price controls. But it was about something nobody would actually think to do these days . . . mandatory cheap bread or something. It was a historical example. At any rate, it’s overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States that price controls are bad. If I suggested that the city implement price controls on Diet Coke, people would say that it would lead to shortages. And if I proposed dealing with the ensuring shortages by saying that anyone who wants to build a new building needs to also provide millions of dollars worth of Diet Coke to people in the neighborhood, people would look at me as if I were insane. Creating the Diet Coke shortages is not a favor to anyone—neither fans nor haters of Diet Coke benefit—and the regulatory mandate is an absurd subsidy to Diet Coke drinkers with no conceivable policy justification. It’s bizarre. But people have a strong bias toward the status quo, so they tend to assume that status quo policy just must be non-bizarre, no matter how at odds it is with everything else. Which is a long-winded way of saying that economists should probably talk more about these kind of everyday examples of weird market-distortions that nobody ever thinks about.

The other thing is that in some of the ensuing discussion, a twist emerged on how to grease the political wheels for this policy. When you price street parking properly—which is to say a price that’s high enough so that there’s almost always a space or two free on every block, but low enough so that there’s not more than a space or two free on any given block—you’re creating a surplus. That surplus takes the form of more customers for local businesses, less hassle for parkers, less traffic for everyone (almost 30 percent of traffic in crowded urban areas is people circling for parking), etc. But some of it takes the form of higher revenue from parking meters. In principle, that revenue could be used to fund all kinds of things. But politically speaking, the best way to make change appealing is probably to earmark the revenue specifically for use in the area getting the performance parking. That way instead of just having the argument about the correct pricing of space on the street, you can sell it to the neighborhood by saying “performance parking is going to repair the sidewalk, refurbish the bus shelter, spruce up this park, and then provide ongoing revenues necessary to keep everything spic and span going forward.”

I’ve never been to Auschwitz. I did, however, visit the lesser-known Terezín concentration camp back in 1997. The experience didn’t inspire me to Twitter a bunch of cheap partisan political attacks. But, hey, I’m not Newt Gingrich. He went and tweeted:

Auschwitz is a horrifying experience which reminded me of thee vil of kim jong I’ll and dangers of al qaeda hamas and hezbollah

And:

Auschwitz is also a reminder that evil men often do what they threaten. An iranian nuclear bomb could lead to a second holocaust

Another fellow named Josh Daws took the bait:

@newtgingrich Silly Newt. Don’t you know that by talking to them they’ll put down their weapons and participate in giant group hug.

And Newt tweeted back:

@JoshDaws I knew you would understand. Chamberlain tried the group hug with hitler and it didn’t work

Haha, dumb liberals. I know this chest-pounding about Iran is supposed to help get more Jewish support, but I think normal Jewish people (or, indeed, normal people of all backgrounds) are going to find this choice of venue a bit distasteful.

An alert industry observer brought to my attention legislation by Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) aimed at revoking the anti-trust exemption the freight rail industry currently enjoys. I don’t want to claim to be an expert on all the ins-and-outs of this but my understanding is that this would be a mistake and that it’s good that Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has switched sides and is now joining Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Frank Lautenberg, and John Thune in opposing this.

One of the reasons the rail situation in the United States has gotten so bad is because of a lot of infighting between the freight rail people and the passenger rail and transit people. More recently, however, the OneRail coalition has come together, which recognizes that rail advocates of all kinds have a great deal in common and can best advance their goals working together. A strong freight rail industry can and should be an important part of America’s transportation network, both because of its own intrinsic benefits (this is a very energy efficient way of moving stuff) and also as part of building a rail system that’s robust enough to also support viable passenger traffic. The fact that rail shipping rates are rising reflects the fact that rail is an appealing option under present conditions. It looks to me like an argument for increasing freight rail capacity not for harsher regulations.