Archive for April, 2007
May Day in Latin America
This Tuesday, May 1, Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez will take control “of Venezuela’s last remaining privately run oil projects.” The symbolism is obvious: the socialist May Day. Last year, Bolivian president Evo Morales sent his soldiers to occupy the gas fields in his country on May Day.
So I’m reminded, as I was last year, that May 1 is also the anniversary of the institution of private retirement accounts in Chile. Since then Chile has been a great economic success story.
Perhaps 25 or 50 years from now, we will know whether Chile’s privatization or Bolivia’s and Venezuela’s nationalizations brought a higher standard of living to their citizens.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
“The Most Important Health Care Legislation of Our Lifetimes”
That is how Gov. Mitch Daniels describes his health care reform plan (which the Indiana legislature passed last night) in an email his staff helpfully forwarded my way. According to the Indianapolis Star, Daniels’ plan will:
- Expand Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and children
- Provide health insurance subsidies to individuals making $20,420 and families of four making $41,300 per year (i.e., 200 percent of the federal poverty level)
- Provide those beneficiaries with $500 of free preventive care and $1,100 in a health savings account
- Institute a “slacker mandate” that requires insurers to allow children to remain on their parents’ insurance policy up to age 24
- Increase the cigarette tax by $0.44/pack, to $0.995/pack
Daniels was understandably moved. Here is his full quote:
The health plan passed last night can fairly be described as the most important health care legislation of our lifetimes. I have asked a host of people whether they can think of a better example and nobody has. I am excited about the passage of the plan and what it can mean for uninsured Hoosiers and for low-income children, and, of course, to try to bring down the second-highest smoking rate in America.
Did Gov. Daniels (R!!) bother checking with anyone who has actually set foot outside of Indiana? Whatever the case, here are a few things the Daniels plan will also do:
- Crowd-out private coverage
- Encourage cigarette smuggling and related crime
- Trap more
IndianansHoosiers in low-wage jobs - Re-create in Medicaid the dependence problems that Congress sought to eliminate with welfare reform
- Impose a brutally regressive tax on the poor. According to Harvard’s Kip Viscusi: “The usual concerns about regressive taxes involve those that are regressive in percentage terms, that is, the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than do the wealthy. Cigarette taxes are actually so regressive that the poor pay a much higher absolute level of taxes than do the wealthy. In 1990, people who made under $10,000 per year paid almost twice as much in cigarette taxes as those who made $50,000 and above. The people who will bear the cigarette taxes are not the legislators who enact them but rather the janitors and support staff for the legislature.“
- Cost more than projected
When conservatives finally do start questioning why so many supposed good guys keep turning to the Dark Side, they might launch their inquisition with an examination of the Medicaid program, which makes Democratic and Republican governors alike this very tempting offer: big government at one-half the price.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Sen. Obama’s Fan Base
Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign received some modest support over the weekend, one from a predictable source, the other modestly surprising.
An editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post welcomed Obama’s attempt to flesh out his foreign policy views in a speech last week before the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. While appropriately knocking his silence on trade issues, the Post praised Obama for his support for a larger military; his willingness to exert pressure on Iran — he stressed that the military option must remain on the table; and his proposal to double U.S. foreign aid to $50 billion by 2012.
Overall the Post editors were encouraged by Obama’s invocation of Franklin Roosevelt, who said that the United States must “lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” Obama might have cited a more recent speech, by a still living politician, that made essentially the same argument (see George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005), but that presumably would not have played well with the base.
Robert Kagan’s praise for Sen. Obama is more troubling. After all, Robert Kagan, one of the founding members of the Project for a New American Century, is a leading advocate of the decision to go to war with Iraq in the first place. Kagan is also a passionate believer in the Bush administration’s stay-the-course strategy in Iraq. (He also wrote recently in favor of preparing the groundwork for a war with Iran.)
Kagan and Obama are ostensibly on opposite sides with respect to Iraq, with Obama favoring a timeline for withdrawal. On this crucial issue, Sen. Obama does seem to be differentiating himself from the policy elite and reflecting the will of the country; 64 percent of Americans favor a timetable for withdrawal in 2008, according to the most recent New York Times/CBS poll.
How to explain, therefore, that Senator Obama has a fan in Mr. Kagan? It could be that Kagan, who is advising Sen. McCain “on an informal and unpaid basis”, wants to undermine Obama’s credibility on the left, thereby ensuring that a less charismatic candidate will emerge from the Democratic field. But that seems too cynical. It also assumes that McCain will be the nominee, which is an even greater stretch.
A more likely explanation is that Kagan is genuinely excited about Sen. Obama’s embrace of the foreign policy status quo. Kagan had a hand in shaping this status quo in the mid-1990s, when he (along with William Kristol) called for the United States to play the role of benevolent global hegemon, aka friendly empire, aka world’s policeman. At a time when 76 percent of Americans say that the U.S. plays the role of world policeman too much, Kagan has found yet another politician who believes the U.S. doesn’t play the role often enough.
This is disappointing. Sen. Obama had earlier said, when asked about his opposition to the war in Iraq, that he was not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars. This makes for a good soundbite, but it does not illuminate the philosophy guiding the most important decisions that a president will make concerning the use of military force abroad. His speech last week shed little additional light on the subject.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Faked Out by One Chart and One Subsidy-Seeking Industry
In a recent post, Ezra Klein offers two arguments to beat back the “commenters hanging around demanding we redefine the word “uninsured,” attempting to downplay the problem of lack of coverage, denying all widely accepted measures of the uninsured, and, when that fails, writing the uninsured off as statistical artifacts of momentary lapses in coverage.”
Klein’s first argument is based on this chart:
According to this chart, 61 percent of those who were uninsured when surveyed reported that in the past year, they had one of the following problems:
- Did not fill a prescription
- Did not see a specialist when needed
- Skipped recommended medical test, treatment, or follow-up
- Had a medical problem but did not visit doctor or clinic
I see two problems with trying to get too much out of these data.
- The Commonwealth Fund survey asked respondents about their insurance status right now, but asked if they had to forgo medical care during the past year. With the exception of respondents who were “insured all year,” it is not clear whether care was forgone while respondents were insured or uninsured. Therefore, this survey says nothing about to what extent being uninsured caused respondents to forgo care. (To his credit, Klein acknowledges that even those with coverage forgo care. To my mind, the fact that medical care grows increasingly expensive even for those with coverage argues against reforms that would mindlessly cover the uninsured without changing the incentives faced by those with health insurance.)
- These data say nothing about the health consequences of the care forgone. Some of the uninsured suffer disastrous health consequences as a result of their lack of access to care, as Jonathan Cohn documents. But these data do not tell us how much of the reported forgone care was necessary and how much was unnecessary. So it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to these findings as “the effects of being totally uninsured.”
Klein’s second argument concerns the estimate that 45 million Americans lack health insurance. That estimate is generated by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. It has been criticized for a number of reasons, which are not important for present purposes.
Klein argues that if the insurance industry uses that estimate then it must be valid. That’s because the insurance industry “isn’t prone to overhyping the millions of Americans without insurance.” Certainly the insurance industry has no interest in exaggerating the number of Americans without health insurance.
Evidently, Klein hasn’t been paying attention to the insurance industry’s political agenda, which includes massive subsidies to the insurance industry to provide health insurance to the uninsured. (Will the Left express shock when the insurance industry hijacks “universal coverage” just as it is hijacking Medicare? Consider yourselves warned.)
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Busy Courthouses, Few Trials
From NYT columnist Adam Liptak:
Trials are on the verge of extinction. They have been replaced by settlements and plea deals, by mediations and arbitrations and by decisions from judges based only on lawyers’ written submissions. …
Instead of hearing testimony, ruling on objections and instructing jurors on the law, judges spend most of their time supervising the exchange of information, deciding pretrial motions and dealing with settlements and plea bargains. …
Those who have the temerity to “request the jury trial guaranteed them under the U.S. Constitution,” wrote the judge, William G. Young of the Federal District Court in Boston, face “savage sentences” that can be five times as long as those meted out to defendants who plead guilty and cooperate with the government.
The movement away from jury trials is not just a societal reallocation of resources or a policy choice. Rather, as Judge Young put it, it represents a disavowal of “the most stunning and successful experiment in direct popular sovereignty in all history.”
Indeed, juries were central to the framers of the Constitution, who guaranteed the right to a jury trial in criminal cases, and to the drafters of the Bill of Rights, who referred to juries in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments. Jury trials may be expensive and time-consuming, but the jury, local and populist, is a counterweight to central authority and is as important an element in the constitutional balance as the two houses of Congress, the three branches of government and the federal system itself. …
I was on jury duty last week, in a state criminal court in Manhattan. During the orientation on Wednesday, a court officer, with mixed pride and hyperbole, said his was the busiest courthouse in America.
I never saw so much as the inside of a courtroom. After a couple of days of milling around in an assembly room with more than 100 other potential jurors, the State of New York thanked us for our service and sent us home.
For more about how plea bargaining tactics tax the right to jury trial, go here (pdf).
To listen to a talk that Judge Young gave at Cato, go here.
The Disaster that Is Dirigo
Health care reformers take note. An article on Maine’s experience with its Dirigo health care program in today’s New York Times highlights some important lessons for those who would use command-and-control tactics to achieve “universal coverage.”
1. Government Coverage Crowds out Private Coverage
The Times reports:
When Maine became the first state in years to enact a law intended to provide universal health care, one of its goals was to cover the estimated 130,000 residents who had no insurance by 2009, starting with 31,000 of them by the end of 2005, the program’s first year.
So far, it has not come close to that goal. Only 18,800 people have signed up for the state’s coverage and many of them already had insurance.
In fact, some 60 percent of Dirigo enrollees previously had private insurance. That’s consistent with recent estimates by economists Jon Gruber (MIT) and Kosali Simon (Cornell) that whenever government provides health insurance to 10 people, six people lose their private coverage. Thus only four people gain coverage as a result of the expansion.
That’s government efficiency for you: covering four people for the price of 10.
2. Adverse selection happens.
More from the Times:
[P]remiums have increased, not become more affordable, because some of those who signed up needed significant medical care, and there are not enough enrollees, especially healthy people unlikely to use many benefits…
The program completely covers preventive care, subsidizes premiums and deductibles, and unlike most insurance plans, covers treatment for mental illness and does not exclude people for pre-existing medical conditions…
An Anthem spokesman, Mark Ishkanian, said the increase was necessary because medical claims of DirigoChoice customers were “substantially higher” than anticipated, about double those of non-Dirigo plans…
[A spokeswoman for the governor] said the state was surprised that more than half of DirigoChoice enrollees qualified for the highest subsidy, 80 percent, which meant the program has been more expensive for the state.
Hmm. Benefits much more comprehensive than the market provides. And enrollees were disproportionately high-cost. Didn’t see that coming.
3. Predicted reductions in uncompensated care may not materialize.
Premiums are increasing under Dirigo. (One diabetic man dropped out after his rates increased 13.4 percent.) Part of Dirigo’s funding was to come from “assumed…savings because an increase in insured people would mean less charity care from hospitals.” Guess not. Gov. Romney, call your office.
4. For some, it’s not about better health care. It’s about more government control.
When even the New York Times sees fit to run an article about how your big-government health plan is a disaster, it takes chutzpah to say that the answer is more mandates, more taxes, and more regulation:
[Democratic] Governor [John] Baldacci said in an interview that when the Legislature enacted the Dirigo Health Reform Act in 2003, it gave him less money and more compromises than he had wanted. He said his administration had now learned more about what works and what does not.
His new proposals include requiring people to have insurance and employers to offer it and penalizing them financially if they do not; making the subsidized insurance plan, DirigoChoice, more affordable for small businesses; creating a separate insurance pool for high-risk patients; instituting more Medicaid cost controls; and having the state administer DirigoChoice, which is now sold by Anthem Blue Cross.
“We’ve got a reform package that takes Dirigo to the next level,” Mr. Baldacci said. “It takes the training wheels off.”
Seems like the training wheels — indeed all the wheels — have already come off.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Barney Frank, the Occasional Libertarian
Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, gave a resoundingly libertarian interview to NPR’s “All Things Considered” Friday evening. Frank has introduced a bill to repeal last year’s ban on online gambling. As he did in this 2003 Cato Policy Forum, he made his argument in libertarian terms. From the Nexis transcript:
ROBERT SIEGEL: First of all, what is your motive here? Is it libertarian? Is it to achieve more revenues for the government by taxing activity? What is it?
Rep. FRANK: It’s libertarian. I am appalled at the notion that the government tells adults that they cannot do certain things with their own money on their own time in ways that do not harm anybody else because other people disapproved of them. …
But my motive is overwhelmingly that I just don’t want to see the government telling people what to do….
SIEGEL: How much money would taxing Internet gambling bring in to the federal government?
Rep. FRANK: Well, in the bill I am – not a lot – I really want to make it very clear, that’s not my major focal point here. Potentially this could be a useful source of revenue just like any other business. But I do want to stress, my main motivation here is that I do think I should mind my own business and I want to deal with the environment, and I want to deal with economic problems, and I want to deal with poverty and all these other things. But I spend a lot of energy trying to protect people from other people. I have none left for protecting people from themselves.
In between those segments, Frank said that we allow lots of things over the Internet–like wine sales–that are appropriate for adults but not for children. And he said that conservatives want to ban things they think are immoral, and liberals want to ban things they think are “just tacky.”
It’s good to hear an elected official use the word libertarian, and use it correctly, and apply it to issues. Would that more of his colleagues would do so. I’m reminded that seven years ago I did a libertarian rating of Congress. Frank did better than most Democrats, and indeed better than most Republicans (including 7 of the 11 members of the Republican Liberty Caucus Advisory Board). But he voted to restrict steel imports, restrict gun sales and gun shows, and implement the restrictive “Know Your Customer” bank regulations, and he opposed a tax cut. So his commitment to not telling what people to do with their own lives and their own money seems limited.
This year, as Financial Services chairman, he’s demonstrating his interventionist tendencies as well as his sometime libertarian instincts. He wants to push all workers into government health care, to regulate corporate decisions about executive compensation, to put more obstacles in the way of free trade across national borders, to keep Wal-Mart from creating an internal bank clearinghouse to hold down its costs. Not to mention expanding anti-discrimination rules to include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Frank told another journalist:
“In a number of areas, I am a libertarian,” Frank said. “I think that John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ is a great statement, and I was just rereading it.
“I believe that people should be allowed to read and gamble and ride motorcycles and do a lot of things that other people might not want to let them do.”
Would that the Republicans who once took Congress on the promise of “the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money” also reread (or read) “On Liberty” and take its message to heart. And would that Barney Frank come to realize that adults should also be free to spend the money they earn as they choose and to decide what contracts, with foreign businesses or local job applicants, they will enter into.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Political Philosophy
Mallaby, Penn & Teller on Immigration
Sebastian Mallaby’s Washington Post column today on immigration is simply outstanding. After providing evidence that hard-working people who have crossed the border without the state’s stamp of approval do not increase the rate of unemployment, cost the average taxpayer nothing, and at worst depress wages of native high school drop-outs by 9 percent, Mallaby makes the argument that many otherwise decent people seem unable to make: the well-being of immigrants counts, too:
[A]lthough the concern for high-school dropouts is welcome, it must be weighed against the aspirations of migrants. Is it right to push native workers’ pay up by 2 percent [a generous estimate of the gain from tighter restrictions on liberty of movement] if that means depriving poor Mexicans of a chance to triple their incomes?
Of course it isn’t, and given that the total economic effect of immigration on U.S. households is a wash, the big ramp-up in enforcement spending beloved by immigration hawks is an egregious waste of money. But no politician is going to say that.
Another excellent, and rather more entertaining, rejoinder to nativist hysteria is Penn and Teller’s new immigration episode of Bullsh*t, available here for your viewing pleasure.
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Tax and Budget Policy; Trade and Immigration
How to Reform E-Voting
On Friday, I made the case for scrapping computerized voting. Today I’m going to look at the leading legislative proposal to accomplish that goal, Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. As I wrote in a recent article, the proposal would do several things:
It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.
All of these seem to me to be big steps in the right direction. Requiring source code disclosure gives security experts like Ed Felten and Avi Rubin the opportunity to study e-voting systems and alert the authorities if major security problems are discovered. Banning Internet connections and wireless networking hardware closes off two major avenues hackers could use to compromise the machines. Perhaps most importantly, by requiring that machines produce paper records, that those records be the official record, and that the records be randomly audited, the legislation would provide a relatively high degree of certainty that even if a voting machine were hacked, we would be able to detect it and recover by using the paper records.
All in all, this seems like a good idea to me. But the legislation is not without its critics. I’ll consider two major criticisms below the fold.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Irish Policy Makers Resist Tax Harmonization
Tax-news.com reports on the growing concern in Ireland about European Union plans to harmonize the definition of taxable income for corporations. Such a scheme, particularly if it is voluntary, is not automatically objectionable. But Irish lawmakers correctly fear that a common tax base is merely the first step on the path to harmonized (and higher) tax rates:
European Union Taxation Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs has reportedly told Irish business leaders that formal plans for a common EU corporate tax base will be unveiled by the European Commission next week. …despite Kovacs’s assurances that the system would be optional for businesses, many member states, including Ireland, are strongly opposed to the CCCTB plans, wary that it would be the first step towards the harmonisation of corporate tax rates across the EU, an idea favoured by France and Germany. If this was the case, Ireland would certainly have a lot to lose, as its 12.5% corporate tax rate has been cited as a major ingredient in Ireland’s economic revival in recent years, and investors certainly would not welcome European interference with Ireland’s corporate tax regime. Consequently, organisations such as IBEC, and Irish politicians, have been lobbying in opposition of CCCTB. …Irish MEP Eoin Ryan…told MEPs that he “cannot and will not accept” moves towards a common corporate tax base. “Tax competition is healthy for the economic development of the European Union. It provides a clear incentive to European Governments to manage their public finances carefully and to build a corporate tax regime that encourages enterprise,” he stated. “The bottom line here is that no one size fits all policy covering corporate taxation matters in Europe is going to succeed. It is neither sensible nor realistic to seek convergence of corporate tax rates across Europe. EU member states have different demographic and social priorities. EU member states need to use their corporate taxation policies in different ways so as to entice foreign direct investment into their countries and generate employment.”
Filed under: General; International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
This Is a Republic (2)
At an appearance in Iowa this month, the Washington Post reports, Sen. John McCain went out of his way to declare his support for President Bush:
“There’s only one commander in chief of the United States, and that’s George W. Bush,” he told the crowd.
No, senator. This is a constitutional republic, and we don’t have a commander in chief. According to Article II of the Constitution, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
That’s an important distinction, and it’s disturbing that any candidate for the presidency would miss it. If McCain wants to be commander in chief of the whole country, of you and me, and to direct us the way the president directs the officers and soldiers of the armed forces, he needs to propose an amendment to the Constitution–an amendment that would effectively make the rest of the Constitution irrelevant, since it was designed as a Constitution for a limited government of a free people.
Next McCain will want us to bow and curtsy.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
European Commission Continues Attack on Swiss Tax System
A Swiss newspaper reports on the latest skirmish in the Brussels-led effort to hinder
Switzerland’s ability to maintain pro-growth tax policy. The European Commission argues that low tax rates are somehow akin to a subsidy, while also arguing that a free-trade agreement between Switzerland and the European Union somehow obliges
Switzerland to modify its tax laws. But the most revealing part of the story is that both the socialists and the so-called conservatives in the European Parliament are in favor of this attack on tax competition:
The European Union has once again taken Switzerland to task for its policy on corporate taxes, which it claims violates a free trade accord with Bern. …Earlier this week senior EU diplomats approved a mandate for talks between the Commission and Switzerland. Brussels argues that the practice of some cantons of partially exempting profits generated abroad from local company taxes is in breach of the 1972 agreement between Bern and Brussels. However, Switzerland which is not a member of the EU, has consistently said that corporate tax and the tax policies of the cantons were never parts of the free trade agreement. …The two main political groups in Strasbourg: the Conservatives and Social Democrats, supported the European Commission in its position against Bern.
This Is a Republic
Queen Elizabeth II is coming to Washington and Jamestown, and the Washington Post offers advice in case you should happen to meet her.
You don’t have to curtsy or bow. That requirement went out a generation ago.
Um, actually, the United States is a republic. (”And to the republic for which it stands.”) That requirement went out in 1776.
The Case Against E-Voting
Ars Technica has an article about problems created by e-voting machines in the French elections on Sunday. Apparently, technical problems caused long lines, causing some voters to be turned away from the polls.
France’s problems are not an isolated incident. In November’s U.S. election, one county in Florida (ironically, the one Katherine Harris was vacating) seems to have lost about 10,000 votes, which happens to be smaller than the margin of victory between the candidates. And there were numerous smaller examples of e-voting problems all over the United States in the 2006 elections.
Those incidents by themselves would be a good argument for scrapping computerized voting. But the most important argument is more fundamental: e-voting is not, and never can be, transparent. The most important goal of any election system is that the voting process be reliable and resistant to manipulation. Transparency is a critical part of that. Transparency makes it more likely that any tampering with the election process will be detected before it can do any damage.
With e-voting, the process of recording, tabulating, and counting votes is opaque, if not completely secret. Indeed, in most cases, the source code to the e-voting machines is a trade secret, not available for public inspection. Even if the source code were available, there would still be no way to ensure that the software on a voting machine wasn’t tampered with after it was installed. This means that if someone did install malicious software onto a voting machine, there would likely be no way for us to find out until it was too late.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Give Us Back Our Monopoly!
The governor of Ohio is threatening to kill most school choice in his state, and several leaders of urban school districts are doing all they can to help him. If you ever wanted to know what really motivates people like this, your answer is clear as day in this Cleveland Plain Dealer article:
Columbus — Leaders of Ohio’s eight big-city school districts are lobbying lawmakers this week to support Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposal to ban for-profit charter schools and ax a statewide school-voucher program.
“We strongly support his position that for-profit entities not operate in our state,” said Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders, co-chairman of the Ohio 8, a coalition of superintendents and teachers union presidents from the state’s largest districts. “We think those funds can more appropriately be used in a public school context.…”
The school leaders want legislators to know they are weary of watching students, as well as tens of millions of tax dollars, fly out of their coffers and into the hands of charter schools — independent public schools that are privately run but publicly funded.
Simply put: Lousy competition is kicking our butts. We want our monopoly back!
Corruption in Atlanta Police Dep’t. ‘Widespread’
A few months ago, Atlanta police officers broke into the home of Kathryn Johnston with a “no-knock” search warrant to look for drugs. Ms. Johnston, who was 88 years old, thought she was being burglarized. When she heard men breaking down her front door, she retrieved her handgun and shot through the door. The police shot back and killed her.
Her tragic death brought scrutiny to the police department, and what a mess it is. Yesterday, several officers pleaded guilty to criminal charges. They lied to obtain the warrant and then they tried to cover up their lies by planting marijuana and cocaine in Ms. Johnston’s home as she lay dead on the floor.
The Atlanta chief of police apparently couldn’t clean house himself — he called 911 and asked for the FBI and federal prosecutors for assistance. Yesterday, federal officials said they are investigating a “culture of corruption.” An attorney for one of the cops involved claims that the officer was “trained” to put false information into search warrant applications! The investigation is still underway.
Last year, the Supreme Court heard a no-knock case and the majority opinion was authored by Justice Scalia. Scalia and the conservatives said that concerns about civil liberties violations were overblown in light of “the increasing professionalism of police forces.” Wrong.
The spotlight is on Atlanta because of Ms. Johnston’s death. But it would be a serious mistake for anyone to conclude that the “culture of misconduct” is unique to that city’s police department. It’s hard to say how bad it is because there’s so little interest in tackling the festering problem. If more journalists would take an interest, we’d see more corrective action, as happened with the Walter Reed scandal. Why not begin with the Maye case in Mississippi?
Media Bias 2?
The Politico has a story about Congress and gun control. The online headline is “Congress slow to respond to shootings with legislation.” The print headline is even stronger: “All Talk, No Progress on Gun Control in Wake of V-Tech.”
This is a standard trope of perhaps unconscious bias. “Progress” is a good thing; if Congress has made “No Progress on Gun Control,” then that’s a bad thing. It’s like the frequent media lead “Congress failed today to pass national health insurance (or an increase in the minimum wage, or global warming restrictions, or campaign finance restrictions).”
Does one ever hear “Congress failed today to reduce taxes”? “No Progress on Deregulation”? I don’t think so. Journalists unconsciously assume that Congress should Do the Right Thing. When it doesn’t, that’s “failure” or “no progress.” Journalists and headline writers should try to find neutral language to describe Congress’s actions.
I’d Be OK with Hinky, Given Post Hoc Articulation
Bruce Schneier has a typically interesting post about right and wrong ways to generate suspicion. In “Recognizing ‘Hinky’ vs. Citizen Informants,” he makes the case that asking amateurs for tips about suspicious behavior will have lots of wasteful and harmful results, like racial and ethnic discrimination, angry neighbors turning each other in, and so on. But people with expertise — even in very limited domains — can discover suspicious circumstances almost automatically, when they find things “hinky.”
As an example, a Rochester Institute of Technology student was recently discovered possessing assault weapons illegally (though that’s not necessarily good policy):
The discovery of the weapons was made only by chance. A conference center worker who served in the military was walking past Hackenburg’s dorm room. The door was shut, but the worker heard the all-too-familiar racking sound of a weapon . . . .
Schneier explains this in terms of “hinky”:
Each of us has some expertise in some topic, and will occasionally recognize that something is wrong even though we can’t fully explain what or why. An architect might feel that way about a particular structure; an artist might feel that way about a particular painting. I might look at a cryptographic system and intuitively know something is wrong with it, well before I figure out exactly what. Those are all examples of a subliminal recognition that something is hinky — in our particular domain of expertise.
This straddles an important line. Is it something we “can’t fully explain,” or something that feels wrong “before [one can] figure out exactly what”? My preference is that the thing should be explainable — not necessarily at the moment suspicion arises, but at some point.
I’m reminded of the Supreme Court formulation “reasonable suspicion based on articulable fact” — it was hammered into my brain in law school. It never satisfied me because the inquiry shouldn’t end at “articulable” but at whether, subsequently, the facts were actually articulated. “The hunch of an experienced officer” is an abdication that courts have indulged far too long.
I hear fairly often of “machine learning” that might be able to generate suspicion about terrorists. The cincher is that it’s so complicated we allegedly “can’t know” exactly what caused the machine to find a particular person, place, or thing worthy of suspicion. Given their superior memories, I think machines especially should be held to the standard of articulating the actual facts considered and the inferences drawn, reasonably, to justify whatever investigation follows.
Filed under: General; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Shed No Tears for U.S. Manufacturers
I’m going on BBC radio shortly to comment on the creation of a new lobbying group called the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Funded in part by the United Steelworkers Union, the group promises to agitate for trade restrictions against allegedly “unfair” imports from China.
Putting the “unfair trade” charge aside for a moment, there is no evidence that U.S. manufacturing as a whole is suffering from import competition, whether fair or unfair (whatever that means). Consider a few facts that you probably won’t find on the AAM’s slick new website:
U.S. manufacturing output is up 40 percent in the past decade by volume. American workers continue to produce more chemicals and pharmaceuticals, more semiconductors and sophisticated medical equipment, more aircraft and even auto parts than ever before.
After-tax profits of U.S. manufacturing companies topped $400 billion last year.
Imports from China have displaced relatively few Americans workers. Workers who have lost their jobs because of imports from China account for only about 1 percent of annual U.S. job displacement. The sectors where China has been most competitive tend to be in lower-value goods such as clothing, shoes and other labor-intensive products.
Manufacturing jobs have been declining, not because of falling production, but because of soaring productivity. We are producing record volumes of manufacturing output with fewer workers because remaining workers are so much more productive.
China represents the fastest growing major export market for U.S. manufacturing exporters.
To get more details and analysis on our trade relationship with China, check out my 2006 Cato Trade Briefing Paper, “Who’s Manipulating Whom?”
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Virginia Tech and Gun Control
Bob Levy: “Anti-gun advocates, however noble their motives, help create the environment in which horrors like Virginia Tech occur.”
Read the whole thing.
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