Cato Daily Dispatch for September 29, 2004
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Taxpayers to Pay for D.C. to 'Play Ball'Gun Ban Vote Scheduled for Today
SpaceShipOne Takes Flight
Taxpayers to Pay for D.C. to 'Play Ball'
"Major League Baseball has chosen Washington to be the new home of the Montreal Expos, a decision that returns the national pastime to the nation's capital for the first time in 33 years," reports the Associated Press.
"Las Vegas; Norfolk, Va.; Monterrey, Mexico; Portland, Ore.; and northern Virginia had been competing for the Expos, but Washington took the lead during negotiations over recent weeks, strengthened by its large and wealthy population base and a $440 million financial package that includes building a new stadium primarily with taxpayers' money."
In "Sports Pork: The Costly Relationship between Major League Sports and Government," Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee, writes: "Before the Great Depression, sports subsidies were rare; today, they are the general rule. The economic facts, however, do not support the position that professional sports teams should receive taxpayer subsidies. The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players."
Gun Ban Vote Scheduled for Today
"The Great D.C. Gun Debate is not a theoretical issue in the living room of Wilhelmina Lawson. The retiree is sitting in her house in the Northeast neighborhood of Trinidad, one of the most violent places in one of the nation's most violent cities," reports the Washington Post.
"With the House scheduled today to vote on the D.C. Personal Protection Act, which would end the District's ban on handguns and allow residents such as Lawson to pack a pistol to fend off, say, a gunman in the back alley, she confesses that sometimes it does not seem like such a bad idea."
If the bill is signed into law, it will nullify two lawsuits by District residents fighting for their Second Amendment rights, including one that has Cato Senior Fellow Robert A. Levy as co-counsel. Levy argues that the legislature should let the courts decide the issue so the Supreme Court can give a pronouncement about the real meaning of the Second Amendment.
In "Challenging the D.C. Gun Ban," Levy writes: "The High Court hasn't decided a Second Amendment case since United States v. Miller in 1939. ... Naturally, D.C. law must comply with the U.S. Constitution, and the federal courts are the ultimate authority on the meaning of that document."
SpaceShipOne Takes Flight
"A team of entrepreneurs blasted a rocket plane into space Wednesday in the first of two flights required to win the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award aiming to boost commercial space travel," reports USA Today.
"SpaceShipOne, the creation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan, lifted off an airstrip in Mojave, Calif., at 6 a.m. PT with the help of a carrier plane. The vehicle, capable of traveling three times the speed of sound, then fired its rocket and headed toward zero gravity -- about 62 miles above the Earth."
Cato adjunct scholar Edward L. Hudgins, editor of Space: The Free-Market Frontier, said in testimony before a House committee that "the demand for trips into space by private citizens offers a potential market that could usher in a breakthrough in the fight to lower the costs of traveling to space." However, government-mandated regulations keep space inaccessible to most entrepreneurs as well as to the general public. Space explores the various ways in which U.S. policy can promote space transportation, exploration and tourism.
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org