Archive for June, 2006
Conservatives on Executive Abuses
Here’s an interesting anecdote bearing on the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers. And it comes from a somewhat unlikely source: the Heritage Foundation’s Lee Edwards, a historian of the conservative movement and biographer of Barry Goldwater.
Edwards tells the story of the FBI, at Lyndon Johnson’s request, placing bugs on Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane:
The bureau’s illegal surveillance was confirmed by Robert Mardian, when he was an assistant attorney general in Nixon’s first term. During a two-hour conversation with J. Edgar Hoover in early 1971, Mardian asked about the procedures of electronic surveillance. To Mardian’s amazement, Hoover revealed that in 1964 the FBI, on orders from the Oval Office, had bugged the Goldwater plane. Asked to explain the blatantly illegal action, Hoover said, “You do what the president of the United States orders you to do.” Read the rest of this post »
Sorry, We Can’t ‘Grow’ Our Way out of the Social Security Problem
Many economists and lawmakers — especially conservatives — argue against tax hikes as solutions to entitlement shortfalls, saying the hikes would be counterproductive. According to this argument, higher taxes would retard growth, reduce federal revenues, and worsen entitlement shortfalls.
For example, Stephen Moore in his June 12 Wall Street Journal column “Don’t Know Much About History…” alludes to a presumed beneficial impact of faster (wage) growth on the financial problems of entitlement programs. Unfortunately, that presumption is incorrect, especially as regards Social Security.
The claim that faster wage growth would reduce Social Security’s financial shortfall is an artifact of the standard (but flawed) 75-year-ahead Social Security financial projections that count payroll taxes through that period but ignore benefit obligations those taxes would create beyond the 75th year. The projections make it look as though robust wage growth would shrink the gap between Social Security revenues and obligations. But the picture changes over a longer timeframe.
Frontline on the War
Readers may be interested in a well done PBS Frontline documentary on the birth of the war on terror and the war in Iraq. The entire documentary can be viewed online.
If you only have a bit of time, start with Part III, in case you held any doubts that the Bush administration took its eye off al Qaeda in Afghanistan as they refocused on invading Iraq. Several gravelly CIA types (some of whom were on the ground in Afghanistan) come forward to make clear that they feel they had al Qaeda hemmed in in the winter of 2001–2002, but they did not get the resources they needed—and asked for—to snap its neck.
There’s also a lengthy workup describing the mishandling of intelligence before the Iraq war. There’s not much new material on that topic, but the documentary is a good synopsis of what we now know. The whole documentary is riveting stuff, well worth a watch.
It’s Not Just About No-Knocks
Jacob Sullum writes:
Hudson v. Michigan, the recent decision in which the Supreme Court said evidence from a search in which police failed to follow the “knock and announce” rule is admissible in court, ostensibly hinged on how close the connection between a Fourth Amendment violation and the discovery of evidence must be to trigger the exclusionary rule. The dissenters argued that the failure of police to wait more than a few seconds for the suspect, Booker Hudson, to answer the door rendered the whole search invalid, making the evidence police obtained “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Writing for the five-justice majority, Antonin Scalia said the exclusionary rule did not apply in this case because the Fourth Amendment violation was not essential to the discovery of the evidence. Had police waited, say, 15 seconds and given Hudson the opportunity to answer the door, Scalia reasoned, they still would have found Hudson’s drugs and gun.
Yet as Scalia also noted, if the police believed that wasn’t the case, that waiting 15 seconds would have allowed Hudson to get rid of the evidence, the “knock and announce” rule would not have applied. So the nexus between barging in and finding the evidence does not really matter. Whether or not a knock-and-announce violation is necessary to preserve evidence, the evidence can be admitted — an easy rule for police to remember but not one that is likely to encourage respect for the knock-and-announce requirement.
This is one of the inherent contradictions in the policy of no-knocks and the use of SWAT teams. Read the rest of this post »
Dick Cheney, Dove?
Rumors continue to swirl that North Korea is about to conduct a test of its long-range Taepodong 2 missile, which would be capable of reaching targets in the United States. The prospect of Pyongyang having not only a small nuclear arsenal but the means eventually to deliver such weapons at great distances has understandably generated agitated commentary in the United States and East Asia.
The latest entry is a Washington Post op-ed by former Clinton administration defense department officials Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry. Carter and Perry suggest that if the North Koreans do not heed U.S. warnings to refrain from conducting the missile test, the Bush administration should launch preemptive air strikes to take out the missile while it is still on the launch pad. Surprisingly, Vice President Dick Cheney rejected their idea.
It is clear that extremist and reckless proposals have come to dominate a policy debate when Dick Cheney is the resident dove. The Carter-Perry article provides more evidence (as if we needed it) that foreign policy irresponsibility is not confined to neoconservatives in the Republican Party.
Hillary and the Candlemakers: Not a Parody
One of the most famous documents in the history of free-trade literature is Bastiat‘s famous “Candlemakers’ Petition.” In that parody, the French economist and parliamentarian imagined the makers of candles and street lamps petitioning the French Chamber of Deputies for protection from a most dastardly foreign competitor:
You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.
We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity. . . .
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival . . . is none other than the sun.
For after all, Bastiat’s petitioners noted, how can the makers of candles and lanterns compete with a light source that is totally free?
Thank goodness we wouldn’t fall for such nonsense today. Or would we?
Last month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and nine colleagues (ranging from Barbara Boxer to Tom Coburn) endorsed a petition from — you guessed it — the domestic candlemaking industry asking the secretary of commerce to impose a 108.3 percent tariff on Chinese candle producers.
I Voted for What?
Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) is an important man in Congress. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee and chairs its Military Personnel Subcommittee which spends $85 billion annually.
Whether he knows how that money is spent is an open question. The Hill reported today that McHugh voted for a defense authorization bill that included a provision “he said he philosophically opposed.” (The provision overrode a federal court’s decision in a dispute between National Guard members and the government about who should pay for correspondence courses).
McHugh apparently had not read the defense authorization bill. Never mind, everyone does it, as The Hill reports, “It is no secret that some — if not most — lawmakers vote on bills that they do not read in their entirety.” McHugh notes that “hundreds and hundreds” of provisions come through, and he relies on his staff “for judgment on more routine matters.”
Members of Congress are elected to work on behalf of their constituents. How can they do that if they don’t read the bills they pass? It is true that the government is so large that supervising how well past laws are being implemented, much less reading bills, takes a lot of time and effort. Maybe more time and effort than even a hard-working member has.
Here’s a thought for members of Congress: maybe the fact that you don’t read the bills you vote for means the government has grown well beyond anyone’s control. Maybe — and this will be shocking to you — the government is too big.
Still Fighting the Last War
The right half of the blogosphere is abuzz with Senator Santorum’s revelation that since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered some 500 pre-1991 artillery shells and other munitions that contain “degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.” (Not much of a revelation, given that in 2004 the Coalition’s Iraq Survey Group acknowledged the existence [.pdf, p. 18] of pre-Gulf-War shells).
It’s all a bit sad and embarrassing. Do the folks trumpeting this story really expect Americans to hear it and gasp: “My God: Saddam might have put some of those degraded mustard gas shells on his unmanned aerial vehicles, and dusted an American city. I’ve had my doubts about this war, but in the end, it was worth it after all!”
The WMD-based justification for the war never made much sense. As Gregg Easterbrook (among others) has pointed out, “WMD” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to chemical weapons: “Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in any meaningful sense. In actual use, chemical arms have proven less deadly than regular bombs, bullets, and artillery shells.” Sure, all of that stuff will kill you, if used properly. But none of it is worthy of the scare term “WMD”–certainly not the sort of decrepit ordnance Santorum’s talking about. Still less can it serve as post hoc justification for the war.
Rube Goldberg, Call Your Office
In a recent blog post, I mentioned L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s quest for control over his city’s public schools.
Well, he got it. Sort of.
After concessions to appease both the teachers’ unions and the school board, the L.A. school district chain of command will soon look like it was designed by Rube Goldberg. On acid.
The Mayor will have more or less complete control over a dozen or so especially troubled schools, and veto power over the Superintendency. The superintendent will gain budgeting powers, except over the union employee contract (which is, of course, the biggest budget item). Teachers and principals will be made no more accountable to parents, but they will gain the power to set their schools’ curricula. The board will negotiate the union contract — except of course that they will lose control over what teachers actually teach. Oy vey.
Had Villaraigosa won the supreme authortity he was seeking, it would have meant a transfer of monopoly power from the board to the mayor, and would have done nothing for the city’s kids. The deal that has been cobbled together amounts to a monopolist with multiple personality disorder. Its prospects are, if anything, even bleaker.
What L.A. needs is for power to be returned to parents. The educational chain of command should involve two parties: the school and the family. If the school fails to measure up, the family should be able to easily move its children elsewhere.
Any other “accountability reform” is self-serving political quackery.
China Syndrome
Higher education policy is being driven by the assumption that to compete in the global economy, especially against burgeoning powerhouses like China, the United States will need a lot more college graduates. It’s the foundation of President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative, and the ivory tower’s justification for demanding ever more taxpayer dollars.
Ironically, China itself illustrates the pitfalls of having the government set education policies based on predictions for the future. Several sources have reported unrest among Chinese college students and recent graduates, whose unhappiness appears to have a single underlying cause. From today’s New York Times:
In 1998 the government encouraged a vast expansion in college-level education. Hundreds of new colleges were founded almost overnight to accommodate millions of new students thought to be needed as engineers, bankers, traders and marketing experts in the fast-growing economy.
So what happened?
The number of college graduates has multiplied fivefold in the last seven years, to an estimated 4.1 million this year. But at least 60 percent of that number are having trouble finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission….
As I wrote in a recent op-ed, don’t believe the hype: Special interests and politicians will try to scare you about the future economy in order to take your money. But as China itself has shown, the only thing we can predict with any reliability is that the government’s predictions will almost certainly be wrong.
“Cursive Is Illegal”
Evergreen State elementary school teachers, take note: Olympia is moving against some of your more affluent failures.
Everyone knows that doctors’ horrible handwriting causes problems for patients and pharmacists. As of this month, it is illegal for doctors in Washington state to write prescriptions in cursive. (Will italics be next??)
The sad thing is that health care markets have become so calcified that this really, really dumb law might actually enhance efficiency. I just hope we won’t have to wait long before some medicine-socializer argues that this proves that government planning is superior to free-market health care. (Any takers?)
Health Care Spending
So much of medicine is probabilistic. If you wanted to really cut costs, you’d take a coldly statistical view of the whole thing, with those who ended up on the wrong side of the numbers regrettable sacrifices. As a society, we’re not ready or willing to do that — and rightly so. But this is the essential conflict: politicians and hospital administrators look at the global budget, while doctors and patients look at the individual’s health. The latter militates for constantly seeking the lowest possible error, the former for going with the statistics and saving money where you can.
He should read the chapter, “Dollars and Decisions,” in Crisis of Abundance.
So, if there were a procedure that cost $10 million, and it could reduce the probability that Ezra would get cancer by one ten thousandth of one percent, would Ezra spend that money? Or would he say that “society” is obligated to spend that money?
I am sorry, but there really are cost-benefit trade-offs in medical care. You can hide your head in the sand and pretend that they do not exist, but in the end they are going to have to be made somehow.
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