Kevin Drum requested my take on an interesting LA Times story about abuse of disabled parking permits in Southern California.

As you know, my baseline on this is that a parked car takes up space—which is to say land—and land isn’t free. It’s especially not free in the Westide of Los Angeles (which contrary to reputation is pretty densely populated) and especially especially not free “in such high-volume parking districts as Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, downtown’s Fashion District and Westwood.” But the key thing is that these aren’t so much “high-volume parking districts” as they are places where land is expensive and also people want to park. A disabled parking permit affords one privileged access to certain parcels of land. Oftentimes—as, in, say Maine—this is a low-value courtesy to hand out, but in a place like southern California it’s quite valuable. And since it’s valuable, people want to sell it or lease it to others who might value it.

The problem with the article is that it posits market-priced parking as part of the problem when really it’s the essence of the solution:

Under California law, as in most states, cars displaying a disabled placard may park for free for an unlimited time at metered spaces. The placard holder does not have to own or drive the vehicle, but if a relative or friend is using the placard to secure free, unlimited parking, then the placard holder must accompany that person or be within “reasonable proximity.”

The law was intended to make it more convenient for individuals with missing or paralyzed extremities, impaired vision or heart, circulatory or lung disease to park conveniently and for as long as necessary to visit doctors or run errands. A disabled placard may be prescribed by, among others, a medical doctor, a nurse practitioner, a certified nurse midwife, a physician’s assistant, a chiropractor or an optometrist.

Precisely the point of demand-responsive parking is that anyone should be able to park conveniently for any duration of time. Instead of rationing parking via time limits, you simply charge a market-clearing price for the space. That means it may be very expensive to park for a long time in certain locations, but it’s always possible to do so. This system, if properly implemented, changes the question of parking “for individuals with missing or paralyzed extremities, impaired vision or heart, circulatory or lung disease” from one of making exceptions to the rationing regime into one of redistributing economic resources appropriately. What’s needed isn’t special parking placards for people with a note from a health care professional (apparently 10 percent of California’s population has one) but redistribution of income to poor people.

(And, yes, this is my anser to most problems—market prices + redistribute income to poor people = win)

Jeffrey Goldberg notes that Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the US-Israel relationship is inconsistent with the idea that he lives in terror of the Iranian nuclear weapons program:

For decades, Israel has been a bipartisan cause on Capitol Hill. It will remain so for a while, but Netanyahu is, through his pedantic and pinched behavior, helping to weaken Israel’s standing among Democrats. Why is this so important? Because Israel has no friends left in the world except for the United States (and in fairer weather, Canada, Australia and Germany). As it moves toward a confrontation with Iran, it needs wall-to-wall support in America. You would think that Netanyahu, who is sincere in his oft-stated belief that Iran poses quite possibly the greatest danger Israel has ever faced, would be working harder than he is to ensure Democratic, and presidential, support, for this cause.

And you can forget Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in this analysis. It’s no secret that the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf are objectively aligned with Israel on the Iran question. Nor is it a secret that said governments can’t afford to be publicly seen as lining up with Israel as long as the Palestinian issue is an open sore. Substantial concessions to the Palestinians as part of an effort to build as broad as possible a coalition against Iran seems like a no-brainer.

Unless, that is, you really and truly on the merits don’t want to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians. When I went to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc it was clearly a very nice place. If I lived there, I wouldn’t want to give up that land any more than Americans want to give their houses back to the Native Americans. Route 443 through the West Bank is a very useful piece of transportation infrastructure, and the people who benefit from it don’t want to give it up any more than any other commuters around the world want to give up their infrastructure. The Israeli settlers in and around Hebron are clearly very committed religious believers, who no more want to give up than do the tens of thousands of deeply committed anti-abortion activists around America. “Lets keep this land” isn’t a crazy policy agenda. Reluctance to give up land won in a war is a very common national priority. But I think it’s time for Americans—and especially American Jews—who don’t agree with this priority to stop being puzzled by it.

An excellent chart from Brad DeLong’s talk at the Urban Land Institute conference makes a point that few people realize—the net impact of the housing boom and the housing bust is that we now appear to have a substantial housing shortage in America:

Part of what’s needed to turn this around is an overall healthier economy. And part of what’s needed is for more land to be zoned so as to permit the construction of multi-family rental units, which would allow people to have places to live without requiring a renewed boom in mortgage lending. Alternatively, some kind of conceptual breakthrough in how to efficiently manage large blocs of single-family homes as rental properties would do the trick.

Josh Marshall:

I agree with Gadi Taub who said recently that while peace is the ideal the highest priority for both peoples right now is partition. Netanyahu’s position makes that impossible. The 1967 lines are the only practical and politically conceivable basis for such a division — with mutually agreed upon swaps of territory along those lines. Netanyahu’s plan is simply to withdraw from areas of dense population within the West Bank. In fact, I think that overstates the case. I don’t think Netanyahu has a plan beyond holding his coalition together and himself in the prime ministership. The rejectionists’ ‘plan’ is simply to hold on for as long as possible and play for time.

The man is a fool at so many levels. But there’s no denying that he speaks for a very large chunk of the Israeli electorate.

I hear this a lot, but I think it’s wrong. I actually think the Israeli politicians with no plan beyond short-term politics are the moderates of the Barak/Olmert ilk who avow the urgent need for partition but can’t ever seem to bring themselves to dismantle a settlement or speak the truth to the Israeli population.

For the right-wing politicians, I think we should to a greater extent take them at their word. There is a genuine religious nationalist view that the Jewish state has to incorporate in an important way the religiously significant city of Jerusalem and its environs and not just the coastal strip where the bulk of the early (secular) Zionist settlement occurred. There’s also a perfectly genuine view that there’s really “no such thing as a Palestinian” other than as a kind of generic “Arab” who happens to live in the former area of the British colony of Palestine. On this view, the entire Palestinian national movement is either a kind of cynical ruse deployed by Arab despots or a bad-faith mask for a desire to destroy the entire Jewish state.

If that’s right, then the best plan really is to build a security wall that incorporates lots of Arab land in and around Jerusalem or otherwise adjacent to the Green Line, cut Gaza and the West Bank off from each other, count on the might of the IDF, the diplomatic protection of the United States, and the growing political strength of Israel-friendly European far-right parties to protect you from hostile neighbors, and cross your fingers hoping for a change in Arab opinion that will allow for the incorporation of Gaza into Egypt and the main West Bank centers of Arab population into Jordan.

I don’t think any of this is correct, and it all founders (both in premise and in conclusion) on the assumed inauthenticity of Palestinian nationalism, but it should be acknowledged that it “makes sense” as a theory of the world.

Mitch Daniels is not running for president. I have to see this as good news for Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty, a fellow midwestern evangelical protestant, is the most demographically similar candidate in the field.

On paper, Pawlenty is ideologically very similar to Daniels. He’s got some minor heterodoxy in his past in the form of flirtation with progressive ideas on climate change, but Daniels has flirted with progressive ideas on defense spending. But as I’ve written previously, conservative elites are distinctly unimpressed with Pawlenty’s actual (meager) record of accomplishments.

Intrade bettors continue to think that Mitt Romney’s odds are better than Pawlenty’s but I don’t see how that could possibly be right. I don’t think it’s appropriate for guys who write about politics for a living to bet on those markets, but I’d say is a huge buy opportunity priced at around 20%. I’d rate 50% as a fair market value.