Archive for August, 2006
Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme
Ars Technica — a wonderful publication with brief, informative, and interesting pieces on technology — is showing a little sloppliness in covering the broadband competition issue. The question whether there is sufficient competition in the provision of broadband Internet service underlies the debate about “net neutrality” — whether there should be public utility regulation of broadband.
Discussing FTC chair Deborah Majoras’ speech at the PFF Aspen Summit, an Ars reporter casually observes, “[M]arket forces really do not exist when it comes to broadband.” That’s at least overstatement. A little more caution would be good given the centrality of the issue.
To show the existence of a duopoly (which is not inherently a competition-free situation), the report links to an earlier Ars piece interpreting a study as showing “not much” competition between DSL and cable. But that conclusion goes only to price competition. And it’s a little overstated, too.
The actual study, from a group called Kagan Research, seems to show that DSL is the low-cost option (and getting lower), while cable is the high-bandwidth option (getting higher in bandwidth while dropping in cost more slowly). That diminishes head-to-head price(-only) competition because each is focused on a different niche. But they’re still in competition.
Role Reversal?
Remember when the Republicans would advocate smaller government and less federal spending?
Freshmen members were typically the most vocal proponents of limited government, as they often brought optimism and a strong ideology to Capitol Hill. After time, some of these GOP ideologues tended to succumb to the culture of Washington and lose their moorings. But this process usually took years.
Lately this phenomenon appears to be happening much more rapidly. Speaking about the recent explosion of pork-barrel spending, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) noted, “We’ve developed a culture, unfortunately, over a number of years where incoming freshmen are conditioned to believe that this is the only way to get reelected.”
Now, it seems even candidates for Congress are talking like inside-the-Beltway porkers. In a hotly contested race for an open congressional seat in Illinois, a “fiscally conservative” Republican is pledging to bring home the bacon if elected.
Welfare for Wineries?
In researching government budgets, I come across dubious spending projects all the time, but one recent example struck me as particularly idiotic and unjust.
The title of a recent press release from New York governor George Pataki says it all: “GOVERNOR ANNOUNCES $500,000 IN GRANTS AVAILABLE FOR NEW YORK WINERIES TO IMPROVE THEIR WEBSITES.”
So, New York is taxing the hard-earned wages of truck drivers and retail clerks and giving it to well-heeled winery owners and web services companies?
Come on Americans, wake up. Far too much of what our federal, state, and local governments do these days is just pure theft.
Apocalypse Warning False Alarm; Diplomacy Continues Apace
Since the apocalypse (which Bernard Lewis darkly warned in the Wall Street Journal might be scheduled for today) seems not to be forthcoming, it may be better to focus on more workaday concerns, such as Iran’s decidedly non-apocalyptic response to the Western proposal over its nuclear program.
Although the full details aren’t out yet, Reuters is reporting what most expected: the Iranians say they’re willing to talk, but not willing to accept American demands that Iran stop enriching uranium as a precondition for talking. Top Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani is quoted as saying that “Iran is prepared to hold serious talks from August 23.”
The first thing to wonder about is what the European response to this will be. It’s fairly clear that hardliners in the Bush administration are hell-bent on pressing for a UN Security Council vote to impose sanctions, but it’s not at all clear what the more sanguine Europeans will do. The Bush administration would be well-advised to make sure that Iran stays marginalized, and America does not act rashly in a way that turns the tables and marginalizes us.
Also, notice that the Iranians brought up the one issue that the Bush administration has assiduously avoided discussing as a part of talks: “security cooperation.” This is international politics-speak for “we’re afraid you’re going to attack us.” Until President Bush makes clear that regime change would come off the table in return for Iran’s cooperation on the nuclear issue, the Iranians are going to be scared to death that Washington has the contingency plans out and is looking at military options.
Data Mining or the Fourth Amendment?
Boalt Hall Law Professor and Visiting AEI Scholar John Yoo writes in a short piece on the AEI website that we should consider using data mining to pursue terrorists. He makes at least two errors: one historical and one statistical.
Discussing the recent vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s, Yoo writes:
[I]ncreasing detention time or making warrants easier to come by merely extends an old-fashioned approach to catching terrorists. These tools require individualized suspicion and “probable cause”; police must have evidence of criminal activity in hand. Such methods did not prevent 9/11, and stopping terrorists, who may have no criminal record, requires something more.
It’s hard to put aside that the vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s would undo part of what the Revolutionary War was fought for. And Yoo’s placement of the phrase “probable cause” in quotes — I hope that’s not to suggest that the language of the Fourth Amendment is quaint.
But putting all that aside, Yoo’s first error has to do with more-recent history. He argues that traditional investigative methods “did not prevent 9/11.” But traditional investigative methods weren’t applied to the problem.
Presidential Public Financing Failure
The push is on to revamp and re-fund the public financing of presidential campaigns.
Brad Smith and Robert Bauer have raised a number of doubts about the presidential system. A while ago, I wrote a policy analysis examining the effects of the presidential system. My new book, The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform, extends that argument.
Here I focus on one question:
The 1976 campaign finance law provided generous subsidies to presidential candidates pursuing party nominations and running in the general election. You would think that the availability of public money would increase the absolute number of candidates for the presidency compared to elections prior to 1976. Has the presidential system led to more candidates for the presidency, more choices for voters, and more competition for the highest office?
Exporters as Hostage-takers?
I subscribe to a useful digest of farm policy news called FarmPolicy. It’s a great little news service for those interested in agricultural issues.
Today in FarmPolicy, my attention and pique were raised by an article that included a statement from Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Co), who said that farming should be an integral part of national security. According to Salazar:
I would hate to think of a day where the United States of America becomes hostage to other countries (that export food to the U.S.), in a way that we are held hostage over our energy needs
I know of only two other countries that pursue a policy of total self-sufficiency in food(which seems to be what the senator is advocating): North Korea and Zimbabwe.
And we all know how well that’s going…
If you are interested in agricultural policy, Cato will be holding a forum next week to discuss the new Farm Bill. The forum will feature the secretary of agriculture, Mike Johanns, as well as Cal Dooley of the Food Products Association and Robert Thompson, one of America’s most respected experts on U.S. farm policy. Please join us.
Happy Birthday, Welfare Reform
Ten years ago today, Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law. As we look back on the results of those 10 years, it’s worth reflecting on just how wrong the critics were.
At the time the bill was signed, the welfare rights lobby warned that “wages will go down, families will fracture, millions of children will be made more miserable than ever.” One frequently cited study predicted that more than a million children would be thrown into poverty.
Rep. Jim McDermott wasn’t satisfied with that prediction — he raised the estimate to 2.5 million starving children. Welfare advocates painted vivid pictures of families sleeping on grates in our cities, widespread starvation, and worse.
The New York Times claimed “the effect on our cities will be devastating.” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) predicted “Hungry and homeless children” would be walking our streets “begging for money, begging for food, even…engaging in prostitution.” The Nation warned bluntly, “people will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar.”
If one listened to the welfare lobbies, you would have expected to be stepping over bodies in the streets every time you left your house.
Striking While the Irony Is Hot
The New Jersey Courier-Post has come out in favor of parental choice in education, and was criticized for doing so on its own op-ed page today. The critic, one John R. Flynn, argues that the Courier-Post failed to provide enough support for its position. Ironically, he provides no support for his own opposition to school choice. Naturally, I felt it my civic duty to point that out in a letter to the editor:
School Choice Critic Uninformed
In his August 21st commentary, John Flynn criticized the Courier-Post for providing, in his view, insufficient evidence for its support of school vouchers. How ironic.
Mr. Flynn voices “serious questions” about the feasibility of public and private school choice programs, but seems not to have seriously looked for the answers. He is apparently unaware that such programs are well established and successfully operating in a host of countries. The Netherlands has had school choice since 1917. Nearly three quarters of its students are now enrolled in private schools and the Dutch outperform American children in every subject at every grade. School choice programs also exist, in various forms, in Chile, Australia, Sweden, and Denmark, among other nations.
If critics spent less time wringing their hands and more time informing themselves about the international success of school choice, they would do a great service to American families.
Spoke Too Soon
Last week in this space, I lamented a couple of the routine, tiny steps that carry us further down the path to bigger and more intrusive government.
By giving state food stamp programs greater access to personal information about Americans, Congress had masked the cost of rescuing Americans from Lebanon. The result was a bill that expanded the federal role in international rescue while spreading personal information about us a little further.
This weekend I discovered the rest of the story. In a separate bill, Congress made available yet more funds for rescuing Americans from Lebanon. Additional cost, 17 cents per U.S. family.
As Tom Palmer pointed out, Lebanon has been a dangerous place as a matter of common sense and announced U.S. policy for quite some time. I suspect that he, like I do, wants Americans to travel far and wide, experience the world, and make friends. But it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to subsidize that process by rescuing Americans when they encounter danger. Americans who need rescue should foot the bill.
Catching Terrorists with 1920s Technology
On August 18, the Washington Post ran a story on the post-9/11 technology investments at the FBI. The story concludes, “five years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and more than $600 million later, agents still rely largely on the paper reports and file cabinets used since federal agents began chasing gangsters in the 1920s.”
As part of the agency’s enormous Trilogy project, a proposed Virtual Case File system designed to help agents share terrorist threat information was scrapped after $170 million and four years of development.
The Post story details the management lapses and lack of oversight at both the FBI and contractor SAIC that led to the breakdown and waste of taxpayer dollars (probably why companies like SAIC get the moniker “Beltway bandits”).
A few of the all-too-common government failings relayed in the article:
The FBI-VCF management disaster is one of many I discuss in my book Downsizing the Federal Government (see here [pdf] for a shorter summary).
The federal government simply cannot manage large, complex tasks with any degree of efficiency. The list of multi-billion dollar failures of technology, highway, and weapons projects grows longer all the time.
New at Cato Unbound: Douglas Massey on Seeing Mexican Immigration Clearly
In today’s edition of Cato Unbound, Douglass S. Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, writes
Mexican immigrants are routinely portrayed as a tidal wave of human beings fleeing an impoverished, disorganized nation who are desperate to settle in the United States, where they will overwhelm our culture, displace our language, mooch our social services, and undermine our national security… This profile, however, bears no discernable relationship to the reality that I know as a social scientist.
Massey, drawing on his decades of research on Mexican migration, argues each element of this picture is false, and has exacerbated the problems of Mexico-U.S. immigration.
Last year Cato published Massey’s study, “Backfire at the Border: Why Enforcement without Legalization Cannot Stop Illegal Immigration.”
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