Photo: Flickr/lynx81

• The District of Columbia government has sometimes been commendably lenient in enforcing its arbitrary zoning restrictions. Except sometimes it decides to enforce the regulations for political reasons.
• Mailer Mailer debunks seven common myths about e-mail marketing. They point out, for instance, that sending lots of messages doesn’t necessarily lead to more unsubscribes.
• Reach Mail, meanwhile, offers advice on the best time of day to send marketing e-mails.
• Phew: demand continues strong for workers with MBAs. (Not so much for JDs, though.)
• Last but not least, Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than physical books.

The Federal Register, within living memory about the size of a family Bible, today takes up about 30 feet of shelf space.

Out of these millions of words of small-print lawyerese, Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, has identified about 30 regulations he’d like to see repealed, as part of a review of regulations mandated by an executive order. That’s nice.

More people would rather live here than anywhere “liveable.” Photo: Flickr/Martin Haesemeyer

• Why cities that people actually want to live in aren’t counted as “liveable” cities.
• Progressives are wrong, Burt Folsom explains: early Christians’ social compact was about private charity, not government redistribution.
• A neat infographic shows how long load times can drive website visitors away.
• Do sanctimonious op-eds about why atheists are better help atheists’ public image?
• How the minimum wage increases unemployment.
• Last but not least, Alex Tabarrok reports that the federal government is finally starting to sell off some of its assets. Uncle Sam owns fully 30 percent of the country’s land area.

Photo: Flickr/schickr

• Prioritizing tasks can be hard. Trent Hamm offers some advice on how to distinguish the important from the merely urgent.
• Why is your marketing copy not converting? Copyblogger has some ideas.
• “Every piece of the ‘success story’ of the auto bailout,” Todd Zywicki argues, would “seem to be in error.”
• Regulatory capture in reverse: heavily regulated industries are protesting a Florida proposal that would remove licensing requirements for professions like interior design and dance instruction.
• Timeliness and concision are the keys to successful marketing on Facebook, Lauren Drell reports. Equally as important: asking your supporters to engage.
• Last but not least, Readability is an intriguing new online tool to make long-form online text easier to read in the browser. The Chrome extension is pretty nifty, but I haven’t taken the plunge to purchase the full service.

Photo: Flickr/IXQUICK

Government is growing ever more intrusive and arrogant, George Will argues in an important new article:

The original constitutional structure has, [law professor Elizabeth Price Foley] says, been inverted: Citizens are required to convince the courts that laws restricting liberty are “irrational”; government should be required to articulate justifications for limiting liberty. The Founders’ goal — in John Adams’s formulation, a nation of “laws, and not of men” — has, Foley believes, “been taken much too far.”

The courts, Will concludes, “incit[e] governmental arrogance by deferring to it. So judicial deference often is dereliction of judicial duty.”

While Will describes a case at the local level, this trend is particularly worrisome at the federal level, where judges have assented to the growth of an extra-constitutional administrative state. Administrative agencies, Gary Lawson ably explains, justify their broad, unchecked powers using a dubious “rationality” argument. And “constitutional law buffs know that ‘rationality’–so-called rational basis review–is code for ‘the government wins.’”

Lawson sums it up colorfully: “When the basic institutions of modern administrative governance are at stake, the Court closes ranks and hurls the constitutional text into the Potomac River.”

This isn’t to say that we need “conservative activist judges” to undo the damage. Instead, we need judges who recognize the importance of the Constitution and America’s first principles. In their decisions, former attorney general Ed Meese insists, jurists should recognize “the importance of grounding their decisions on the bedrock of original understanding instead of the shifting sands of public or personal opinion.”

A Philadelphia parking lot. Photo: Flickr/Tim McFarlane

Like many urban problems, the decline of walkable, livable urban centers can be traced to government intervention. In Triumph of the City, Ed Glaeser argues that restrictive zoning regulations served only to distort markets, artificially limit density and make dense areas unaffordable.

In a new article for Cato Ubound, Donald Shoup argues that minimum parking requirements—which require developers to build a certain number of off-street parking spaces—have promoted auto-oriented urban design over denser, more walkable forms:

First, parking requirements prevent infill redevelopment on small lots, where fitting both a new building and the required parking is difficult and expensive. Second, parking requirements prevent new uses for many older buildings that lack the parking spaces required for the new uses…

Removing a parking requirement is not the same, however, as restricting parking or putting the city on a parking diet. Rather, parking requirements force-feed the city with parking spaces, and removing a parking requirement simply stops the force-feeding. Ceasing to require off-street parking gives businesses the freedom to provide as much or as little parking as they like. Cities can remove minimum requirements without imposing maximum limits, and opposition to parking limits should not be confused with support for minimum requirements. Minimum parking requirements may be our most disastrous experiment ever in social engineering, and ceasing to require off-street parking is not social engineering.

Over at Market Urbanism, Stephen Smith points to a study on how parking minimums distort builders’ decisions. The study, Smith says, finds “that at least half of all non-commercial properties have more parking than they would otherwise choose, and that the excess can oftentimes be quite large.”

Photo: Flickr/Jason Lawrence

• How a cab medallion system is counterproductive: it introduces artificial scarcity and distorts drivers’ incentives.
• Russ Roberts points out that Japan’s fuel shortages are no mystery and that the solution isn’t more regulation. Shortages are a result of price controls that keep a scare product artificially inexpensive.
• Some fancy CSS work by Josh Brewer yields an impressive typographic result.
• New York City’s parking “privatization” scheme is a bad idea that isn’t really privatization at all, Stephen Smith argues.
• Last but not least, Dan Mitchell rounds up the late-night hosts’ cracks about Libya. My favorite, from Conan: “It’s being reported that Moammar Gadhafi is surrounded by an elite core of female bodyguards. In a related story, Charlie Sheen invaded Libya.”

In the current crisis, conservative efforts to restore the separation of powers may even be more important than a campaign to shore up federalism. TARP, for example, was an unprecedented delegation of legislative power to the Treasury secretary, of all people. It was a desperate, essentially lawless grant resembling the ancient Roman dictatorship, except that the Romans wisely confined their dictators to six-month terms. Obamacare is a 2,000-page monstrosity that will need thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pages of additional regulations before it can operate. These will be issued by more than a hundred new bureaucracies, each a source of unaccountable power wielded over individual Americans. These multiplying centers of petty tyranny will accelerate our transformation from a republic of laws to a corrupt regime of muddled and ever more arbitrary power.

The Library of Congress’ online catalog includes several great old pictures of Dupont Circle, including this one of the circle before the fountain was installed:

Sean Fieler and Jeffrey bell ask whether we should revisit the gold standard as one way to rein in runaway government.

Last but not least, Reihan Salam explores whether legislation to limit ATM fees will be counterproductive. He cites a fun article on the topic by Thomas Hazlett, who sarcastically asks, “can anyone explain why at a price of $0, quantity supplied is nil?”