Archive for July, 2006
Boehner Cites, Promotes Americans’ Anxiety
National Journal’s Hotline has dutifully reprinted House Majority Leader John Boehner’s open letter of encouragement to fellow Republicans as they go into the summer recess. In it, Boehner cites Americans’ ongoing anxiety about a number of issues.
“International threats are also contributing to the anxiety American families feel,” he writes. He continues:
[Terrorists are] bent on destablizing democracies throughout the world. And they are more determined than ever to penetrate our leaking borders and carry out their murderous ambitions against innocent citizens on American soil.
Naturally, Boehner derides Democrats for failing to do security like Republicans do security.
Last year, for example, 152 Democrats voted against the REAL ID Act, which implemented needed driver’s license reforms, making it more difficult for potential terrorists to obtain driver’s licenses or state ID cards, and ensuring that states improve their data security.
Nevermind that false ID was not part of the modus operandi of the 9/11 terrorists. Identification requirements are not very good for tracking or controlling criminals and essentially worthless for stopping suicidal terrorists, but they are very good for tracking and controlling law-abiding citizens.
In Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, Timothy Naftali frames this kind of letter:
The politics of fear have . . . prevented a serious national conversation about the true dimensions of the threat. The public has no idea of the tradeoffs between security and freedom. Their elected representatives speak of doing everything necessary to protect them, while each political party argues that it is more likely than the opposition to keep the nation secure.
This perspective turns the Boehner letter into a caricature. Naftali adds, “The American public should be informed that the terrorists cannot win any war against the United States . . . .”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
On What Planet?
Peter Beinart writes in the New Republic:
The struggle that initially roiled the Clinton administration–between deficit hawks and deficit spenders–is basically over; today, even the most liberal Democrats are fiscal conservatives.
Stephen Slivinski’s new book does demonstrate that today’s Republicans are bigger spenders than LBJ. But as the National Taxpayers Union notes in its latest rating of congressional voting, the average Democrat still votes for far more spending than the average Republican. Democrats offer no plan to avert the impending insolvency of the Social Security system. They have denounced the Republicans’ trillion-dollar expansion of Medicare on the grounds that it isn’t generous enough.
Even the relatively conservative Democrats at the Democratic Leadership Council recently released a plan to spend hundreds of billions more taxpayer dollars on everything from college tuition to housing to socialized health care for children to McGovern-style “demogrants” for every baby, with no plausible offsetting spending cuts.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Ready to Pay More for Longer Lines at the DMV?
The Decatur (Alabama) Daily News reports that a server shut-down froze driver licensing operations on Friday.
Lines that tend to be long on the best days meandered double-file through hallways at the Morgan County Courthouse after a computer server in Montgomery shut down at about 12:45 p.m. The faulty server, which came back online at 3, is owned and maintained by Oregon-based Digimarc Co., a state contractor, according to [the Alabama Department of Public Safety].
Digimarc is one of several companies that are in the business of licensing and regulating driving. Another cited in the story is AAMVA, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which operates a variety of driver surveillance programs under the AAMVAnet brand.
AAMVAnet is the conduit most states use to access various databases involved in driver license applications and renewals. Alabama uses the service for commercial driver license information, problem-driver point systems and Social Security number verification.
AAMVA is particularly interesting because it styles itself as a neutral interlocutor on motor vehicle administration, police traffic services and highway safety. But according to its non-profit disclosure form, its $30 million in 2003 revenue was comprised of $11 million in government grants and more than $14 million from “contracts/user fees” – most of it likely from operation of the Commercial Driver License Information System.
Anyone who understands the role of self-interest in guiding organizations – even ‘non-profits’ like AAMVA – must recognize that this is an advocate for increased driver regulation and surveillance, most recently through the REAL ID Act’s national identification card. If REAL ID is implemented, AAMVA stands to increase its revenue ten times over.
Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Martha Earnhardt told the Decatur Daily News, “As more and more states go through AAMVAnet, it hasn’t been able to handle the volume.” But AAMVA intends to move you into the national ID program – long lines or not – using your state and federal tax dollars.
More on AAMVA and the REAL ID Act can be found in my book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misuderstood.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Political Entrepreneurship
From the Washington Post:
[Kevin] Schieffer is trying to persuade the Federal Railroad Administration to give him a $2.5 billion loan for the project [to build a 1000-mile rail line from Wyoming to Minnesota], among the largest in history.
If it succeeds, it could be a boon to farmers — and Schieffer.
The project would cut transportation costs for coal, corn and ethanol, and would make Schieffer what Fortune magazine calls “America’s first self-made railroad baron since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.”…
“He’s talking about using eminent domain out here and just wiping out 110 or 120 farms and ranches out here,” [rancher Paul] Jensen said.
Schieffer received help from an old friend, someone he admired as a South Dakota basketball legend years ago: Sen. John Thune (R), who defeated Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D) in 2004.
Despite opposition from the White House, Thune helped persuade Congress last year to increase the amount of the program from $3.5 billion to $35 billion. Thune, who received campaign contributions from Schieffer and who earned $220,000 as DM&E’s chief lobbyist in the 18 months before joining the Senate, is promoting the project to lure jobs. The law would allow Schieffer to put down no collateral and to make no payments for up to six years. [Sen. Mark] Dayton and other critics fear that taxpayers would be on the hook if the project were to fail.
He’s no James J. Hill.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Two Former Police Chiefs on Overkill
Joseph McNamara — a 35-year law enforcement official, including 18 years as a police chief in Kansas City and San Jose — has kindly praised my recent report on police militarization.
Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper also had some kind things to say about the paper.
The terrific group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has also put out an extended press release and endorsement.
Is the President Even Paying Attention Anymore?
Via Matt Yglesias, this from President Bush:
“There’s a lot of suffering in the Palestinian Territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy.”
As Matt properly asks, does it really make sense to argue that Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy — when democracy is what put them in power in the first place???
The Happiest Zombies
In the same vein as David’s fascinating post below, here is a refreshingly accurate article on the relationship between wealth and self-reported happiness around the world from the New Scientist titled “Wealthy Nations Hold the Keys to Happiness.” The occasion of the article is the publication of a world map by Adrian White, a Ph.D. psychology student at the University of Leicester, that vividly pictures self-reported life satisfaction around the world. The relationship between wealth and the percentage of people who say they are happy leaps out pretty clearly.
According to the analysis, a country’s happiness is closely related to its wealth, along with the health and education levels of its people. It is no surprise that people spending heavily on healthcare, such as US citizens, rank highly, says White, as this investment increases life expectancy and general wellbeing.
“There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people,” he says. “However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher [earnings] per capita, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.”
Capitalism Saves
The Sunday New York Times has a great article — the first of a series on aging — titled “So Big and Healthy Nowadays That Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You.” Reporter Gina Kolata begins with this 19th-century biography:
Valentin Keller enlisted in an all-German unit of the Union Army in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1862. He was 26, a small, slender man, 5 feet 4 inches tall, who had just become a naturalized citizen. He listed his occupation as tailor.
A year later, Keller was honorably discharged, sick and broken. He had a lung ailment and was so crippled from arthritis in his hips that he could barely walk.
His pension record tells of his suffering. “His rheumatism is so that he is unable to walk without the aid of crutches and then only with great pain,” it says. His lungs and his joints never got better, and Keller never worked again.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Political Philosophy; Regulatory Studies
Fusionism Gone Cold?
Here’s a piece from the Washington Times covering last week’s America’s Future Foundation–sponsored debate between Reason’s Nick Gillespie and National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. The debate’s topic was the state of the libertarian/conservative alliance (Or, as the ad copy put it, libertarians and conservatives: “are we best friends forever?”). I missed the debate, but in my view, the answer is emphatically ”no.”
The American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias provided one of the best short explanations for why the answer is ”no” on his blog a while back. As a guy on the center-left, Yglesias stands well outside the conservative-libertarian alliance and thus may be in a better position than the rest of us to see what’s going on.
Matt points out that the Right is made up of two kinds of people, those who are ”motivated primarily by a distrust of the state” and those who ”are motivated more by a distrust of leftwingers.” This is not quite the same as saying “the libertarian-conservative alliance is made up of libertarians and conservatives,” since there are conservatives who are consistent opponents of statism and self-identified libertarians whose main focus is opposing the Left.
From the New Deal to the 1990s, political conditions in America favored an anti-left/anti-state alliance, since the Left, for the most part, controlled the state:
The New Social Engineering
Apparently I’m behind the times. I’ve always understood the term “social engineering” to mean what the American Heritage Dictionary calls “the practical application of sociological principles to particular social problems,” or what Mises called “treat[ing] human beings in the same way in which the engineer treats the stuff out of which he builds bridges, roads, and machines.”
But in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal I discover that “social engineering” now means “tactics that try to fool users into giving up sensitive financial data that criminals can use to steal their money and even their identities.” It includes “phishing” and other online scam tactics. If you Google “social engineering,” you can wade through pages and pages before you find any links to the older meaning.
I guess there is a connection between the two kinds of social engineering. One online tech dictionary says, “Social engineering is manipulating people into doing what you want, in much the same way that electrical engineering is manipulating electronics into doing what you want.”
Filed under: Political Philosophy; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
A Telling Analogy
From the Washington Post:
“At this point, it seems like the war on drugs in America,” added Spec. David Fulcher, 22, a medic from Lynchburg, Va., who sat [in a barracks in Baghdad]. “It’s like this never-ending battle, like, we find one IED, if we do find it before it hits us, so what? You know it’s just like if the cops make a big bust, next week the next higher-up puts more back out there.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Getting People to Love Welfare for Politicians
The lobbying campaign to reconstruct the presidential public financing program continues apace. Its authors have designed the bill to appeal to marginal presidential candidates of both parties; it will be less favored by incumbent presidents and skilled fundraisers like Hillary Rodham Clinton. But Congress, not third-tier candidates, have the authority to enact the bill into law.
Members of Congress know the public rejects the presidential system. The number of households checking off the box on the tax form has dropped from 28 percent in 1978 to 11 percent in 2002. It is probably under 10 percent today. Why should Congress pour more money into a program that the public has seen in action and rejected so completely?
Well, if public opinion is a problem for “reform,” coercion is the solution.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Hey, GOP: Combat Anti-worker Image by Being Pro-worker!
Any real concern House Republicans may have for low-wage workers is apparently evaporating in the heat of the midterm elections.
Here’s the GOP political calculus, as reported by the New York Times:
Republican moderates used a closed party meeting on Thursday to make their case for a vote, saying it was crucial for helping to dispel the party’s antiworker image. The moderates ran into opposition from conservatives who said the wage proposal could turn off campaign contributors with the elections looming and drive away the party’s business base. But some lawmakers said opponents also recognized the political necessity of giving moderates some political cover, a prospect more appealing than potentially losing their majority in the House.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Trade and Immigration
Hmm. Students Are Leaving… Maybe We Should Improve?
This headline and story, ladies and gentlemen, is what market education reform is all about:
School board, staff to address student exodus
Saying it’s time to take a direct role in addressing parents’ concerns about district schools, the Columbus Public Schools Board of Education pledged to create a vision statement to guide policies that will strengthen the city schools and keep students from leaving.
At the same time, administrators and staff members promised to work together on ways to make the the district better.
Board members held a special meeting last Thursday, along with administrators and members of the district’s employee unions, to discuss a survey that said one in nine parents plans to withdraw their child from CPS this year.
That, in a district that has lost nearly 7,000 students to charter schools over the past several years, and stands to lose more because of private school vouchers this fall….
Want Electronic Medical Records? Fix the Incentives
Suppose you are traveling, and needed to visit a doctor, who says he’d like to do an MRI. You had one done just two weeks ago at home, but your personal doc would have to snail mail the image to the new doc. The new doc needs to have a look inside you, but another MRI would be expensive.
Now think: in what kind of health care system are you more likely to get electronic medical records, where doctors can send MRI results to each other instantly:
- A health care system where you are on the hook for the cost of the second, unnecessary MRI, or
- A system where someone else (Medicare, your employer, etc.) is going to pay for it?
Thanks to government subsidies and the federal tax code, Americans are less sensitive to the price of medical care than even Canadians, whose government is supposed to pay for everything. As a result, most providers still keep patients’ medical records on paper, essentially because the government lets them get away with it. Some providers have started using electronic medical records, but those systems are in their infancy and are unable to talk to each other. That means lots of wasteful spending, plus treatment delays and medical errors.
When Katrina hit Louisiana, thousands (millions?) of medical records were destroyed. But when the World Trade Center went down in a fiery blaze, there was no hue and cry about the loss of financial records, because those were secured, electronically, in various sites. Why the asymmetry? My guess is that the financial services industry has customers who demand value, including responsiveness and security, because they bear the cost. Health care providers that do have price-sensitive customers, such as services like MinuteClinic and TelaDoc, do offer electronic medical records. But most of the health care industry does not have price-sensitive customers, and we have Congress to thank for that.
So when House Republicans plan to vote this week on legislation that would spend your tax dollars to encourage the creation of electronic medical records, it seems like a classic case of one fouled-up government intervention begetting another. Congress has spent the last 60 years doing little in health policy but insulating patients from the costs of paper medical records. But don’t worry, because now they’re going to throw $40 million of the taxpayers’ money at health information technologies (HIT) that create interoperable medical records.
In a further demonstration that Congress is wasting its time (isn’t there a war on?), this week Microsoft announced plans to start producing interoperable electronic medical records. Maybe the fact that the private sector is trying to muster to the task — in spite of Congress’ past meddling — will persuade Congress not to compound its past mistakes. Perhaps Congress will instead look at ways to restore the incentives that encourage providers to offer such cost-saving innovations. One can always hope.
Chicago City Council to Low-wage Workers and Poor People: Eat Dirt!
The Chicago City Council has proved beyond doubt its aggressive hostility to the welfare of low-wage workers and low-income consumers by its approval of an ordinance that would forbid Chicagoans from legally entering into agreements to work for less than $10 an hour and $3 in benefits—even if they want to—with retailers with $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet.
By prohibiting job-seekers from accepting terms of employment to their and potential employers’ mutual benefit, the City Council has effectively requested that major employers like Wal-Mart and Target open fewer new stores in Chicago, and make available fewer (and possibly no) new jobs. Additionally, the Council has asked Chicago’s low-income consumers, who would benefit most from more discount retail outlets, to forgo significant increases in their quality of life.
As NYU economist Jason Furman wrote in Slate by way of crushing Barbara Ehrenreich in a debate about the effect of Wal-Mart on America’s working class:
A range of studies has found that Wal-Mart’s prices are 8 percent to 39 percent below the prices of its competitors. The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn’t mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that’s a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.
Why does the Chicago City Council insist on harming workers by denying them their moral right to enter into work agreements on terms they find acceptable? Why does the Chicago City Council want to keep things from getting better for its city’s poor?
Is Opposition to the Bush Doctrine “Isolationism”?
The online version of the New York Times runs the following headline for its story covering its poll on Americans’ attitudes on foreign policy:
Americans Showing Isolationist Streak, Poll Finds
The substance of the poll shows several things: Americans want out of Iraq, they don’t want to deploy US servicemen to try to make peace in Lebanon, and they don’t think that it’s our responsibility to go around the world attempting to force peace on warring nations.
Is that really “isolationism”? I covered the topic of “isolationism” earlier this year when a Pew poll interpreted Americans’ desire to “mind our own business internationally” as a sign of isolationism. (Should we not mind our own business internationally???)
I’ll say one thing: If the media keeps portraying the choice as between the Bush doctrine or “isolationism,” then isolationism is going to end up with a lot more adherents than any of us thought.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security
“Precipitous” Withdrawal Defined
Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has never been shy about voicing his opinions. But while his comments on the current crisis in Lebanon before a small group of Washington insiders hosted by Steve Clemons and the New America Foundation has elicited some media coverage, I was most struck by his comments on Iraq.
Brzezinski was an early advocate of a relatively swift military withdrawal from Iraq. In January 2005, he laid out the choices in Iraq in stark but simple terms:
we will never achieve democracy and stability [in Iraq] without being willing to commit 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have a draft, and [impose higher taxes].
As a society, we are not prepared to do that….even the Soviet Union was not prepared to [take equivalent steps in Afghanistan] because there comes a point in the life of a nation when such sacrifices are not justified.
(The full transcript can be found here.)
One year later, Brzezinski made his case again, this time on the op-ed page of the Washington Post:
The real choice that needs to be faced is between:
An acceptance of the complex post-Hussein Iraqi realities through a relatively prompt military disengagement [or]
An inconclusive but prolonged military occupation lasting for years while an elusive goal is pursued.
It is doubtful, to say the least, that America’s domestic political support for such a futile effort could long be sustained by slogans about Iraq’s being “the central front in the global war on terrorism.”
In contrast, a military disengagement by the end of 2006, derived from a more realistic definition of an adequate outcome, could ensure that desisting is not tantamount to losing.
Such talk has been widely panned by the Bush administration’s defenders, who typically dismiss any talk, of any timetable — six months, one year, or ten years — as “cutting and running”.
But Brzezinski remains undeterred. During last week’s meeting he said “We [should] start talking to the Iraqis of the day of our disengagement. We say to them we want to set it jointly, but in the process, indicate to them that we will not leave precipitously.”
He then went on to say “I asked [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad what would be his definition of precipitous and he said four months.”
Four months.
Four months is tantamount to immediate. 130,000 troops cannot be extracted from any country, even under the best of conditions, in a matter of weeks. Doing so in a hostile environment requires that additional measures be taken to ensure troop safety, and this can add weeks or even months to the project. I don’t believe that U.S. troops could be safely withdrawn from Iraq over a period of less than four months, given the conditions on the ground.
However, I have long advocated (e.g. here, here, and here) that the U.S. military’s mission in Iraq be terminated in an expeditious fashion. And I’m hardly alone. Today’s New York Times reports that 56 percent of respondents in their most recent poll favor a timeline for withdrawal; and, according to the most recent Gallup/USA Today poll, 50 percent of Americans favor a troop withdrawal within the next 12 months, while only 8 percent favor sending more troops.
It may be that Khalilzad was speaking out of turn. And it is never wise to base decisions on second-hand information, even from a source as credible as Brzezinski. However, if the Bush administration defines precipitous as less than four months, then we might be onto something.
A military withdrawal from Iraq, conducted over, say, a 12-month period, would provide ample time to coordinate with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government on the handover of security responsibilities, and already enjoys support among the American public, and, increasingly, on Capitol Hill. That would hardly be “precipitous” and it certainly is better than our current open-ended policy.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Online Gambling Roundup
I have a Cato podcast today looking at federal efforts to ban online gambling. Jacob Sullum and Walter Williams have also offered critiques of the crackdown, including the recent arrest of BetonSports.com CEO David Carruthers.
In a sort of convergence of two issues I’ve been covering lately, last month, a SWAT team conducted a heavy-handed raid of an underground poker room in Dallas. The SWAT team brought along a camera crew from the A&E reality show Dallas SWAT to record the action. This was no Sopranos-style game where everybody’s packing. It was a well-known, advertised, gray-area gathering of poker fans. The Pokerati blog has more details.
For posterity, here’s a photo of the Dallas SWAT team. This is what they brought to crack down on a group of people playing cards. The Pokerati blog says the SWAT team brought computer-generated maps that looked to be specific to poker rooms, indicating that this is likely the first of many such raids.
And it isn’t the first time. SWAT teams have also been breaking up underground games in New York City. They’ve even been used to raid charity poker games in Baltimore, Denver, and all over the state of Ohio.
In my home state of Virginia, a SWAT team shot and killed unarmed Sal Culosi last January. They had come to arrest the optometrist for the crime of betting on sports games with friends. And in 1998, a SWAT team on a gambling raid in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reid, who was in a car reading a book, and mistook the police officers for burglars (the club he was guarding had been robbed months earlier).
It’s scary how quickly “good-intentioned” paternalism can turn into frightening militarism.
Gay Marriage Ban Will Make Gays Make Babies?
The Washington State Supreme Court has upheld that state’s ban on gay marriage based on the following brilliant bit of reasoning:
“Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race….”
And how, my good Justices, will it do that?
Will gays say: “Well, Hank, we can’t get married, so lets go find some dames and make babies”?
Or will the prohibition on gay and lesbian marriage work a Viagra-like spell on straight couples, causing them to reproduce with added alacrity?
Neither. Forbidding gays from getting married isn’t going to make them “just go straight all of a sudden” and start shopping at Baby Gap. Nor is it going to increase fertility among straights.
Any anyway, if the rationale for legal marriage is procreation alone, when do we start seeing the forced annulments of all those childless couples? Or the reverse of China’s one-child policy: “you must have at least one,” instead of “you can have at most one.”
If there is any silver lining to this decision, it is the 5-4 split of the justices — far closer than decisions in similar cases a generation ago. Perhaps, in another few years…
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