Archive for May, 2006
Crisis of Abundance Watch
Joe Kristan is reading Crisis of Abundance and blogging the experience. He writes
Crisis of Abundance says
“An important characteristic of premium medicine is that many procedures have a low probability of affecting the outcome. In fact, often the procedures do not even affect the treatment plan.”
Digital mammography seems an apt illustration of this point. It is more effective for only a minority of patients, and the treatment for a cancer discovered digitally doesn’t differ from that discovered on film. Yet as it is the latest technology, and in short supply, the digital technology will cost more. It’s an illustration of “premium medicine” that could have come right out of C of A. And, as C of A notes, spending on imaging services is growing twice as fast as health spending as a whole.
He is referring to an article in the Wall Street Journal on digital mammography.
Mike Tanner says it’s fine that Americans spend a lot on health care. I would agree if it were an income effect. The problem is that with 85 percent of our health care services paid for by third parties (a stat which I got from the Tanner-Cannon book), I think it’s largely a substitution effect, based on an implicit price to the consumer of zero.
If you want to comment on this issue, go to the Amazon page for Crisis of Abundance. Scroll down for the discussion forum.
Giving Diplomacy a Shot
Lots of whispers around Washington this morning that today’s the day that State will announce that the US is willing to come to the table with the Iranians. And sure enough, at 11:00 this morning, Secretary Rice announced that the United States will join the EU-3 nations (Britain, France, and Germany) in negotiations with Iran, provided that Iran is willing to suspend uranium enrichment.
This is a step in the right direction for the administration. Now, though, it’s important that we keep the talks focused and cut to the chase, preventing the talks from turning into torturous and largely pointless name-calling matches like the Six Party talks in North Korea. Those of us who are advocates of diplomacy will be watching the negotiations closely.
Expect loud bellows of outrage from the few remaining Bush doctrine supporters any time now.
Next Week at Cato Unbound: The Future of Work
Join us next week for the June issue of Cato Unbound devoted to glimpsing the future of work in America.
Richard Florida, author of the bestselling Rise of the Creative Class, will lead off with an essay this coming Monday. Replying to Florida over the following week and a half will be: George Mason economist and futurist Robin Hanson, an expert on robot economics [pdf]; UCLA economist Edward Leamer, author of a much-circulated review [pdf] of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat; and MIT economist Frank Levy, co-author of The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the New Job Market.
Here’s what they’ll be talking about:
The economists tell us that technology is a substitute for some forms of human capital and a complement to others. As the pace of technological advance continues to quicken, the “information age” evolves into something new, and the world economy becomes ever more integrated, the most economically valued set of human skills and capabilities continues to shift rapidly. Tens of millions of Americans used to make, and many still do make, a good living in low- and medium-skilled assembly line jobs. However, many of these jobs can now be done at less expense by machines, or by lower-paid workers in poorer countries like China and India. At the same time, the return on investment in education continues to rise, widening the gap in pay between workers with college degrees and workers without them. What do these trends mean for the future of work in America? Are there any jobs safe from mechanization and outsourcing? If part of rising inequality a function of the match between technology and human capital, what can be done to ensure that more people develop the right kind of capital? In a changing global economy, what is America’s comparative advantage? If you had a child tomorrow, and wanted her to get ahead, what would you want her to pick as her college major eighteen years from now?
Join us next week for a provocative look at the future of work in our high-tech, globalized world.
Give Us Liberty… or Send Your Kids to Public School
Back in January, the Florida Supreme Court struck down that state’s “Opportunity Scholarships” school voucher program. I discussed their bizarre léger-de-loi here, and called for a state constitutional amendment to correct it here.
After the amendment effort failed in the State Senate, some Floridians have decided to take matters into their own hands, circulating a petition to guarantee universal school vouchers.
While their exact policy prescription differs from what I’d suggest, it has a delightful little catch: “If the Amendment is not passed, all elected officials and schoolteachers must send their children to public schools.”
That would run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters ruling guaranteeing parents the right to private schooling (assuming they can afford it), but rhetorically, it’s a pretty good point. Today, the only folks who have school choice are the wealthy, who can either choose a different school district by moving, or choose an independent school by paying tuition.
The poor, by contrast, are generally condemned to the public school to which they are assigned by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. How is this supposedly uniform system of public schooling working out for them?
America has the largest achievement gap between wealthy and poor students of any industrialized country in the world.
The only way that will change is if we extend choice to all families, regardless of income.
On Second Thought, Let’s Not Go Dutch
Heritage Foundation education analyst Dan Lips has a piece out today arguing for a federal school voucher program.
It does a great job documenting the dire educational situation facing millions of disadvantaged American kids, and wisely recommends giving them and their families unfettered choice of government and independent schools.
That said, it’s both dangerous and unconstitutional to have the federal government handing out school vouchers. I explain the problems (and the “going Dutch” reference) here, along with suggesting a safer, state-level alternative.
Selective Outrage
Here’s the webpage for Rep. Sensenbrenner’s breathlessly titled hearing on the FBI search of Rep. Jefferson’s office: “RECKLESS JUSTICE: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?” It’s a stacked deck–four scholars who share Sensenbrenner’s outrage over the raid.
Perhaps the testimony of Jonathan Turley or Bruce Fein, both of whom have been on the right side of important separation of powers issues in the last few years, will change my mind. But right now the congressional reaction to the search reminds me of President Clinton piously invoking the Constitution in defense of the God-given, natural right to fool around with the help and lie about it in court. As Clinton put it at a news conference in 2000: “on the impeachment, let me tell you, I am proud of what we did there, because I think we saved the Constitution of the United States.”
If you’re going to defend the Constitution, you could pick clearer grounds than a narrow interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and it would also be nice if you’d demonstrated the slightest interest in defending it before Ken Starr came knocking. Similarly, if you’re going to complain about “Trampling the Constitution,” it’s a little unseemly to start with penumbras and emanations from the Speech or Debate Clause, when you have a president who claims inherent authority to break any law that Congress passes if he believes it constrains his freedom of action in the war on terror. Marty Lederman puts it well:
if this were part of a concerted congressional effort to fight back against the tide of Executive aggrandizement, the outrage might be understandable. But Congress has been almost completely indifferent, for two years running now, with respect to very serious separation-of-powers challenges — an Executive branch that has repeatedly asserted a constitutional power to ignore statutes regulating the conduct of war; that has kept virtually all of its dubious activities secret from the legislature and public; that has resisted any serious oversight; that has engaged in widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens without warrant or probable cause of wrongdoing (or that the U.S. persons are agents of al Qaeda); etc. And Congress has simply sat back and done nothing. If Denny Hastert, et al., had been fighting tooth and nail on torture, and oversight of Iraq, and the manipulation of intelligence, and the use of signing statements to signal noncompliance with scores of statutes, and violations by NSA of FISA and other statutes, etc., then perhaps this latest incident would rightly be seen as a straw that broke the camel’s back. But… Congress has instead allowed its own core constitutional powers — such as the enactment of laws — to be swept aside with impunity by an Administration with a strikingly aggressive view of Executive prerogatives. That legislators care much more about the sanctity of the contents of their offices than about the enforcement of the laws they have written is, perhaps, predictable, but nevertheless unfortunate.
Sloan’s Cash Cow
Columnists often have cash cows–storylines that they milk over and over. Allan Sloan writes the “Deals” column in the Washington Post, and his cash cow is outrage over corporate mergers and acquisitions that avoid taxes.
In dozens of columns, Sloan has complained about corporations that (legally) minimize their taxes when doing M&As. Typically, he implies that we would be better off if every M&A on Wall Street got hit with a hefty tax of 30 percent or so. In today’s column, Sloan complains that a proposed transfer of the Atlanta Braves from Time Warner to Liberty Media would avoid $700 million in taxes, and that average taxpayers would be ”shut out.”
Here are some issues that I’ve never seen Sloan address:
1) Does it make sense to tax M&As at all? Why should Uncle Sam get a pound of flesh every time American businesses do some restructuring? M&As often have capital-gains-tax implications. But capital gains taxes can represent a double-taxation on business earnings. Under a more efficient tax system, capital gains would not be taxed at all.
2) Two items that make the tax effects of M&As complex are capital gains and depreciation. These items are unique to income taxes. Under a consumption-based tax system, such as the Steve Forbes Flat Tax, they would be eliminated and M&As vastly simplified. Why not focus on tax reform as a systematic fix to the problems of M&As, rather than complaining about each individual deal?
3) Better yet, why not eliminate the corporate income tax altogether, as many eminent conservative and liberal economists have advocated over the decades? Corporate taxes are ultimately paid for by workers, consumers, and individual shareholders. The former group probably bears most of the burden in the modern globalized economy. If $700 million of taxes were avoided on the Atlanta Braves’ deal, the biggest winners are likely to be American workers.
Whining about the particular effects of our complex tax code is easy. I’d rather see columnists like Sloan tell us how to simplify the code so that corporations aren’t encouraged to pursue the fancy tax sheltering that he chronicles in the first place.
Beinart on Being Wrong
Peter Beinart, among the loudest and most passionately pro-Iraq-war liberals, recently got a generous book deal to write about what Democrats should do about foreign policy. Beinart has since recanted his support for the war, admitting (with a list of excuses) that it was a mistake.
Kevin Drum interviews Beinart about his book at the TNR website (sub. req’d.) and asks this:
KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like [yours] why should anyone listen to you now?
PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that.* Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general–most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were–and I think Al Gore is in this category–deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people. (emphasis added)
Per Beinart, pundits’ predictions deserve to be judged by themselves. So if someone has a consistent record of making wrong predictions and embracing dubious premises in support of a policy that turns out to be a catastrophe, when that person starts issuing declarations about similar issues, we shouldn’t pay any attention to his track record, apparently.
That’s pretty convenient. There were plenty of folks who got Iraq right. Beinart got it wrong, and yet has hardly missed a beat in urging an interventionist foreign policy on his fellow liberals. Something’s a bit odd there.
*(I’d certainly quibble with Beinart’s belief that Gulf War I was a slam dunk success. It put US troops in Saudi Arabia which served as a “principal recruiting device” for Osama bin Laden to rally support against the United States and laid the groundwork for the second war against Iraq. But that’s a separate matter…)
A Flood of Immigrants?
In the midst of the Senate debate on an immigration bill this month, the Heritage Foundation published a report claiming that legalization of undocumented workers already here and creation of a temporary-worker program would unleash a flood of more than 100 million new immigrants in the next 20 years. The headline-catching number turned heads on Capitol Hill, provided grist for talk radio, and hardened the opposition to immigration reform.
In hindsight, however, the number looks less and less plausible. Consider: If immigrants did come in such numbers, the average would be 5 million a year. That compares to an average immigration inflow, legal and illegal, of about 1.5 million during the past decade. The U.S. economy simply could not produce enough jobs each year during the next two decades to attract and employ that many immigrants. We also know from experience that previous attempts at legalization did not unleash a flood of so-called chain migration, in which newly legalized and naturalized workers sponsor spouses, children, parents and siblings. Check out an op-ed article posted today on the Cato web site that spells out in detail why the 103 million figure is a gross exaggeration.
The Congressional Budget Office, in its own study [.pdf] released May 16, calculates that immigration reform along the lines of what the Senate passed last week would increase immigration over the next decade by less than 8 million. And an analysis by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers found numerous methodological faults with the Heritage study, including double counting and failure to account for emigration.
The Heritage study generated a lot of heat in an already over-heated immigration debate. Unfortunately, it failed to provide any real light.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Trade and Immigration
And the Award for Least Menacing Threat Posed by Global Warming Goes to…
Al Gore – Master of Understatement
My nomination for quote of the day comes from former Vice President and current lecturer-in-chief Al Gore: “We now have the capacity to literally change the relationship between the Earth and the sun.”
HSAs Grow Faster than Critics’ Understanding of HSAs
An article in today’s Detroit Free Press reports that health savings accounts (HSAs) are catching on, and showcases some of the less-valid criticisms HSAs.
In the article, Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argues that a family of four with an annual income of $30,000 and the usual expenses is unlikely to be able to save $5,000 per year in an HSA.
There are a number of problems with that argument. For example, it doesn’t address the question, “Compared to what?” The alternative to HSAs is usually comprehensive third-party health coverage, which carries much higher premiums than high-deductible health insurance. If the family can’t afford to save, where are they supposed to get the money to pay those higher premiums? Also, there’s nothing in the HSA law that says a family must have $5,000 of cost sharing. The family’s cost sharing could be as low as $2,100. (Less cost sharing means higher premiums, but shouldn’t the family be able to make that tradeoff for themselves?)
The article raises a number of other criticisms of HSAs, all of which I address in a study released today by the Cato Institute titled, “Health Savings Accounts: Do the Critics Have a Point?“
Peruvian Elections and the Future of Latin American Populism
The upcoming Peruvian runoff elections for president may provide another sign that the wave of Hugo Chavez-style populism in Latin America has crested. The contest is between Alan Garcia–a former populist president who ruined the country during his term (1985-1990) with heterodox economic policies (Peru was set back 30 years in terms of per capita income; had 7,000 percent inflation in 1990; and much of the country was controlled by the Shining Path guerrillas)–and Ollanta Humala–an extreme nationalist and populist who, following the example of Chavez, led a brief but failed rebellion against the outgoing regime of President Alberto Fujimori in 2000. Humala´s popularity among the most disenfranchised of Peru´s poor, especially in the country´s interior, went virtually unnoticed among Peru´s elite and the press until last year. (Peruvian adjunct scholar Enrique Ghersi was alone in foreseeing this development in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor in 2003).
Garcia promises to run a responsible government that respects the constitution and the separation of powers, including the independence of the central bank. Humala promises nationalizations, a rejection of the free trade agreement with the United States pending in the congress, a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, and the arrest of corrupt ex-presidents including Garcia himself.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; International Economics and Development
Jump Ship!
Thursday’s New York Times Economic Scene article by Austan Goolsbee made the rounds late last week. Here’s Alex Tabarrok’s take. Be sure to read the comments. From the left, here’s Lindsay Beyerstein and commenters. Goolsbee presents research that shows that the state of the economy when you take your first job can have a long-lasting effect on future earnings:
Lost in the argument over whether young people today know how to work, however, is the mounting evidence produced by labor economists of just how important it is for current graduates to ignore the old-school advice of trying to get ahead by working one’s way up the ladder. Instead, it seems, graduates should try to do exactly the thing the older generation bemoans — aim for the top.
The recent evidence shows quite clearly that in today’s economy starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come. Graduates’ first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and their “future income stream,” as economists refer to a person’s earnings over a lifetime.
The importance of that first job for future success also means that graduates remain highly dependent on the random fluctuations of the economy, which can play a crucial role in the quality of jobs available when they get out of school.
[...]
These data confirm that people essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up. The recession graduates who actually do catch up tend to be the ones who forget about rising up the ladder and, instead, jump ship to other employers.
What’s really the advice here? Shoot for the top, or do a lot of switching? Goolsbee seems to be endorsing aiming for the top, but the last sentence above, about jumping ship, seems to support something else altogether.
In 1995, with my degree in Studio Art and the History and Philosophy of Art firmly in hand, I landed a plum “you want fries with that” gig at the Arby’s in the Iowa City mall. I guess I should be glad I didn’t try work my way up the Arby’s ladder!
Stanford’s Paul Oyer, whose study Goolsbee cites, says: “Try to get lucky. And also, think carefully about that first job because it can matter for the rest of your career.” Isn’t this is terrible advice?
First, Oyer assumes that maximizing lifetime income is our goal, which is absurd. I imagine you should try to get a job you will like. And it is lucky indeed to hit the career bullseye with the first throw. So you should simply assume that you won’t get lucky, won’t get the dream job out of the gate. Even if you do get the dream job, you’ll likely find that it’s not such good luck after all, and find yourself dreaming a different dream. It will take a while to find the right fit, so plan for that.
Still, even if your goal is lifetime income maximization, the article seems to indicate that you should bail from your first job just as soon as you can get one that pays more. Your earnings are path-dependent as long as you stay on the same path. So don’t. Switch paths. The days of 35 years, a gold watch, and a pension are long gone.
Anyway, why even try to get lucky with your first job? If I’m giving advice to undergrads, I’m going to tell them to study something they really enjoy—something they’ll get satisfaction from for their rest of their lives. I don’t use it on the labor market, but my art history major is and will continue to be a source of enjoyment to me. About the first job: don’t think ladder, think springboard. (However, if you’re studying something interesting but not very marketable, make sure you get some real work experience in another area, so you don’t find yourself in the dread category “educated but unskilled.”) As I mentioned before, people are afraid of volatility, but many would be happier if they took more risks. In a society like ours, a good diploma from any decent college, grad, or professional school is pretty much all the safety net you’ll ever need, especially when young and childless, so the risk of job-switching isn’t actually very risky at all.
Europe’s Public Health Crowd Hunkers Down to Fight the Scourge of “Secondhand Drinking”
Via the excellent Spiked Online:
The campaigns to combat the effects of ‘passive smoking’ are widely credited for Europe’s growing number of smoking bans. Now alcohol is in the sights of the public health lobbyists, and they have invented the concept of ‘passive drinking’ as their killer argument.I have seen a leaked draft report for the European Commission, which is due to be published some time in June. It makes claims about the high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the ‘harm done by someone else’s drinking’. The report is likely to inform proposals for a European Union alcohol strategy later this year.
[...]
By October 2004, the theme was established in a Eurocare submission to the Commission. ‘Alcohol not only harms the user, but those surrounding the user, including the unborn child, children, family members, and the sufferers of crime, violence and drink-driving accidents: this can be termed environmental alcohol damage or “passive drinking”.’
This of course is a replica of the roadmap the prohbition movement used at the beginning of the last century, though Spiked author Bruno Waterfield does draw one distinction, invoking John Stuart Mill:
Once the temperance movement believed man could be saved. Today, it joins with the public health lobby to treat drinking as a form of social pathology rather than a question of moral redemption. Once, public health had the aim of protecting society against disease. Today, the ‘new public health movement’ seeks to protect society against people themselves.
Today’s public health outlook on drinking dovetails neatly with other powerful contemporary trends that emphasise human vulnerability or undermine trust between individuals. Linking drinking to free-floating risks, independent of the intentions of individuals, is a characteristic of today’s anti-humanist climate. But 200 years after his birth, we can take heart from the works and legacy of Mill. He stood against the tide in his day and won. We owe him a debt and we owe the future of freedom a duty to make our own stand against the new public health alliance of the twenty-first century.
I warned in a Cato paper a few years ago about the rise of the neoprohibition movement here in America. Think it couldn’t happen again? Consider this little nugget, pulled from the DEA’s website:
A word about prohibition: lots of you hear the argument that alcohol prohibition failed—so why are drugs still illegal? Prohibition did work. Alcohol consumption was reduced by almost 60% and incidents of liver cirrhosis and deaths from this disease dropped dramatically (Scientific American, 1996, by David Musto). Today, alcohol consumption is over three times greater than during the Prohibition years. Alcohol use is legal, except for kids under 21, and it causes major problems, especially in drunk driving accidents.
Mark Thornton took on apologists for alcohol prohibition in a Cato paper way back in 1991.
An Otherwise Helpless Consumer Public?
In 1971, a federal court expressed the rationale behind the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act when it wrote that the law was “enacted for the protection of an otherwise helpless consumer public” [United States v. Lit. Drug Co., 333 F.Supp. 990, 998 (D.N.J. 1971)]. But would consumers be helpless without the Food and Drug Administration certifying the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologics, and medical devices? A recent National Public Radio report suggests the answer is no.
The one area where Congress has reined in the FDA’s regulatory authority has been dietary supplements. The FDA has no authority to regulate the content or safety of dietary supplements before those products are sold. Since the FDA doesn’t require testing, there is no testing. Right?
Wrong. A for-profit firm called ConsumerLab.com tests dietary supplements with an eye toward catching unsafe or mislabeled products in the lab before they harm anyone. ConsumerLab.com provides reports on its findings to consumers who pay an annual fee, but it provides information on product recalls at no charge.
Filed under: General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Regulatory Studies
Doha Round: Curb Your Enthusiasm
In a sure sign of how desperate negotiators are to get a signal that something—anything—is going to come of the Doha Round of global trade talks, there has been much ado this week about the revised “offer” that the European Union has made on agricultural market access, one of the necessary elements in a successful deal.
Even the Australians—usually one of the most reliable critics of European agricultural policy—have welcomed the sign of flexibility.
But what would this offer mean exactly? There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to get excited about. For a start, no numbers were mentioned. The message from EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, delivered by David O’Sullivan, director general of the EU’s trade directorate, merely said that “if, and only if, key partners also put something worthwhile on the table—the EU will be prepared to enhance further its current agricultural offer.”
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
EPA Witchdoctors Get No Peace
A coalition of unions representing U.S. EPA scientists and other specialists sent a letter to EPA chief Stephen Johnson on Wednesday asserting that agency managers and pesticide industry officials are exerting political pressure to allow the continued use of organophosphates and carbamates, which are used in many industrial pesticides. The letter complains that EPA scientists are being pushed to skip steps in their regulatory testing of the chemicals, arguing that ”the integrity of the science upon which agency decisions are based has been compromised.”
This is rich. The methodology being employed by the EPA to ascertain human health risks for these and other chemical substances has long been discredited by academics, who, at best, suggest that it holds promise but has a long way to go, or, at worst, suggest that it is akin to astrology or palm reading. If the environmental Left were serious about allowing scientific concensus to dictate federal policy (a proposition they ardently embrace when the topic turns to global warming), the tests at issue would have been junked long ago.
But by all means, let’s not disturb the witchdoctors!
Minn. Taxpayers Make Gophers Golden
If you’re a fan, like I am, of a small college that tries to play big time sports, you know how tough it is for your school to compete against gargantuan state universities that have tens of thousands of students, hundreds of thousands of alums, and a seemingly endless supply of professional quality facilities.
Well, things just got a bit tougher: On Wednesday, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty signed legislation authorizing the construction of a new, $248 million, on-campus football stadium for the University of Minnesota. Of course, one more academically essential football stadium at a state mega-versity only marginally hurts most smaller institutions (except for Northwestern). The people it’s really throwing for a loss are Minnesota taxpayers, who are being forced to pick up 55 percent of the tab—or more than $136 million—for the Golden Gophers’ new gridiron.
Not only do big state schools have an unfair advantage over small private colleges, it seems they have one over state taxpayers as well.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Conservatives Say: Politics Above All
The Washington Times brings news this morning that conservatives are “expressing concern and outrage” about House Speaker Denny Hastert’s strong objections to the FBI’s raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s House office.
Perhaps such “conservatives” ought to recall what the real conservative libertarian who designed the U.S. Constitution once wrote:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Hastert is acting in the spirit of Federalist 51. To be sure, there are other considerations in this case, but Hastert is doing what Madison expected congressional leaders to do: stand up for his branch of the government against an encroachment from an ambitious executive. Those who are criticizing Hastert are trying to make corruption a bipartisan stain or to raise public approval of Congress by a point or two. They are ignoring the constitutional dimension of all this.
I’ll take the timeless logic of Federalist 51, thanks.
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