Archive for June, 2007
Cato@Liberty: Safe For Children
Libertarians are often associated with such out-of-the-mainstream activities as drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc., because out-of-the-mainstream activities are the very things that intolerant mainstream types try to stamp out via coercion.
But according to the web site mingle2.com, the Cato@Liberty blog you’re reading right now would be rated PG by the motion picture industry. Evidently, the words “drugs” and “torture” kept us from getting that coveted G-rating.
Good god, have we gone mainstream?
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Political Philosophy
Lazy Leftists, Part Deux
Am I going to have to include Brad DeLong in this category?
Last Wishes for Trade Policy
With 19 months left in the Bush presidency, June 30 marks the unceremonious end of his trade policy. Though things haven’t looked bright on the trade liberalization front for quite a while, there was a time when the agenda had promise and its keepers had enthusiasm. Tomorrow’s expiration of the president’s trade promotion authority, thus, accentuates the sadness of promise unfilled. On top of that, responsibility for trade policy is returning to a Congress that is, perhaps, more skeptical of trade than any Congress since the days of Smoot and Hawley.
The main goal of the administration’s trade policy was a multilateral trade agreement. That proved elusive, and now the Doha Round lies in a cryogenic state. The administration did bring home some bilateral and regional deals that are important, but relative to what could have and should have been accomplished, it ain’t much.
As we enter the post-TPA period, there are four trade agreements that have been signed, but not yet approved by Congress. The congressional leadership today finally came out and said they will not support the deals with Korea or Colombia (as expected). They offered support for Peru and Panama, but we’ll see whether the rank and file goes along. I’m skeptical.
Regrettably, we may have to endure a dark period on trade policy as members of Congress work to outdo each other with ridiculous, self-defeating legislation. The last responsibility of the Bush administration on trade policy, then, is to hold the line against the onslaught of anti-trade, anti-China legislation and make sure none of those bills becomes law.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade
Raise Your Own Darn Taxes
In a Politico story about what appears to be push-polling (”a political campaign technique in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll”) by Hillary Clinton is this gem:
Freeman Ng, a software designer in Oakland, Calif., reported getting a call late in the morning of May 5.
He wrote on DailyKos that day that he was asked how the fact that “Barack Obama failed to vote in favor of abortion rights nine times as a state senator” might affect his vote.
He said he was also asked a question that associated Edwards with tax hikes.
“A lot of the statements struck me as being very conservative and moderate in orientation, like the tax thing,” said Ng, who stands well to the left of center. “To me, that was a plus that he’s going to raise my taxes.”
Hey, you wanna pay more taxes? Fine, pay more taxes. Nobody’s stopping you. But leave me out of it.
Warren Buffett’s Faulty Tax Math
Class-warfare activists were delighted when Warren Buffett recently complained that his tax rate was too low and that his secretary was subject to a higher effective tax rate. The various news reports, including the excerpt below from Tax-news.com, do not provide any detail on Buffett’s taxes, but he almost certainly was being either dishonest or ignorant.
It is probably safe to assume that Buffett receives lots of dividend income and that he also declares a considerable amount of capital gains, both of which are subject to a 15 percent tax rate on an individual tax return. What he did not mention, however, is that corporations pay a 35 percent tax before distributing dividends to shareholders, so the actual effective tax rate on that portion of Buffett’s income is closer to 50 percent.
The capital gains tax is another example of double taxation. An increase in the value of a stock is a reflection of an anticipated increase in the future income stream from that stock. Yet that income stream will be taxed (usually two times!) when it occurs. The real effective rate on that portion of Buffett’s income is harder to calculate, but it certainly will be far higher than 15 percent.
Shifting gears, Buffett’s calculations almost surely include Social Security payroll taxes, which only apply to the first $90,000 of income in exchange for not providing huge benefit payments to rich retirees. Indeed, the overall program is highly progressive once benefit payments are added to the equation, so Buffett’s secretary gets a better deal than he does from Social Security (though both would be better off with a system of personal retirement accounts).
Last but not least, if Buffett really thinks he is not paying enough to government, he can write a check to George Bush, Ted Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi. But he should not try to assuage his feelings of guilt by seeking higher taxes on other people:
Warren Buffett, perhaps the most successful investors of modern times and one of the world’s wealthiest men, has spoken out against the U.S. tax system which allows him to pay proportionately less of his multi-million dollar annual income in taxes than his cleaning lady. Addressing attendees at the $4,600-a-place fund-raising dinner for the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign, Buffett, who runs investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is reputedly worth $52 billion, told the 600 Wall Street bankers and money managers that: “(We) pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.” According to Buffett, he makes no use of tax shelters to mitigate his tax liability, but still managed to pay an average tax rate of 17.7% on his $46 million income last year. By comparison, his secretary, who earned $60,000, paid tax at 30%.
Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
The most fascinating story in the world is China today, as the world’s most populous country struggles toward modernity.
The Chinese rulers seem to be trying to emulate Singapore’s success in creating a dynamic modern economy while maintaining authoritarian rule. But can a nation of a billion people be managed as successfully as a city-state? Since 1979 China has liberated its economy, creating de facto and even de jure property rights, allowing the creation of businesses, and freeing up labor markets. The result has been rapid economic growth. China has brought more people out of back-breaking poverty faster than any country in history.
And, as scholars such as F. A. Hayek have predicted, the development of property rights, civil society, and middle-class people has created a demand for political rights as well. Every week there are reports of actual elections for local posts, lawyers suing the government, dissidents standing up and often being jailed, labor agitation, and political demonstrations. It’s reminiscent of the long English struggle for liberty and constitutional government.
And it would be great if it turns out that modern technology can make that struggle shorter than it was in England. A hopeful example was reported this week. According to the Washington Post, hundreds of thousands of “text messages ricocheted around cellphones in Xiamen,” rallying people to oppose the construction of a giant chemical factory. The messages led to “an explosion of public anger,” large demonstrations, and a halt in construction.
Leave aside the question of whether the activists were right to oppose the factory. The more significant element of the story is that, as the Post reported, “The delay marked a rare instance of public opinion in China rising from the streets and compelling a change of policy by Communist Party bureaucrats.”
Cellphones and bloggers fighting against the Communist Party and its Propaganda Department and Public Security Bureau — and the “army of Davids” won. Reporters and editors afraid to cover the story followed it on blogs, even as the censors tried to block one site after another. This isn’t your father’s Red China.
Citizen blogger and eyewitness Wen Yunchao
said he and his friends have since concluded that if protesters had been armed with cellphones and computers in 1989, there would have been a different outcome to the notorious Tiananmen Square protest, which ended with intervention by the People’s Liberation Army and the killings of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in the streets of Beijing.
The cause of freedom is not looking so good in Russia these days. But in China a hundred flowers are blooming, a hundred schools of thought contending.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
O Massachusetts!
A clever former intern of mine (who says things like “aboot”) puckishly notes that the date by which Massachusetts residents are legally required to obtain health insurance falls on Canada Day.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Heritage — Unhealthy
In his post on the differences over energy policy between the (conservative) Heritage Foundation and the (libertarian) Cato Institute, Jerry Taylor mentions that the two Washington think tanks also have differences regarding health care. For those who are curious, here’s where I see the biggest differences between Cato scholars and Heritage scholars on health policy:
The Heritage Foundation’s health policy team generally supports having the government force people to buy health insurance. Cato scholars generally do not. A couple of weeks ago, Heritage’s director of health policy studies Bob Moffit wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
[M]y Heritage Foundation colleagues and I support the “personal responsibility principle.” It’s a simple idea: All adults have a responsibility to buy their own health insurance, pay their own health care bills, and not shift those costs to others….
People who can reasonably afford it have a responsibility to buy health insurance to protect themselves and their families against the financial devastation of catastrophic illness….
People who do not wish to buy health insurance for whatever reason should be free to do so. But, in exchange, they must demonstrate in some tangible way that they are really going to pay their own hospital bills.
My Cato colleagues and I generally differ, for a number of reasons: such “individual mandates” are impractical, ineffective, and expand government power beyond its legitimate scope. Government should and does require people to pay their debts, meaning that patients already are legally responsible for their medical bills. The Heritage “personal responsibility principle,” on the other hand, would hold a Christian Scientist responsible for debts that he will never incur.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Political Philosophy
Compulsion: The Only Tool for the Job?
Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on race-based student assignment programs is pretty clear: public school districts cannot simply use racial balance targets to determine where children will go to school.
A key point in the ruling is that districts must exhaust racially neutral means of achieving their diversity and minority achievement goals before race-based student assignment can even be contemplated. In both cases before the court, the districts failed to do that.
This central point of the ruling apparently escaped CNN judicial analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who made the following statement in a live interview: “the school districts were told they couldn’t integrate their schools.”
Live TV is an unforgiving medium, especially when covering breaking news, so it’s not entirely clear that this is what Toobin meant to say. What is clear is that it is 100% nonsense.
Integration is a goal. There are many possible ways of achieving it besides government compulsion. As I pointed out in a blog post on Thursday afternoon, it can in fact be much better achieved through voluntary school choice programs that make both public and private schools financially viable options for all families. Summaries of some of the relevant studies, along with links to the full text in several cases, can be found here.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Law and Civil Liberties
Zimbabwean Economics Spreads to Capitol Hill
In Zimbabwe, the government is ordering businesses to cut prices and threatening to jail executives who don’t comply, in an attempt to deal with inflation that is now variously estimated at somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 percent a year.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill both houses of Congress have passed legislation establishing stiff penalties for those found guilty of gasoline price gouging. The bill directs the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department to go after oil companies, traders, or retail operators if they take “unfair advantage” or charge “unconscionably excessive” prices for gasoline and other fuels in an “energy emergency.” (The complex energy legislation is still working its way through both houses, though both have endorsed the price-gouging provisions.)
How’d'ja like to be the bureaucrat charged with enforcing such vague and emotional language, or the businessperson trying not to incur a 10-year jail sentence for doing something “unfair” or “unconscionably excessive”? It’d be sort of like living in, you know, Zimbabwe.
Did Congress offer bureaucrats and businesses any more specific guidance? You bet they did. H.R. 6 and S. 1263 define an ”unconscionably excessive price” as a price that
(A)(i) represents a gross disparity between the price at which it was offered for sale in the usual course of the supplier’s business immediately prior to the President’s declaration of an energy emergency;
Filed under: Energy and Environment; International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
SCOTUS: Public Schools May Not Be Overtly Racist
In a 4 + 1/2 to 4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down today the race-based public school student assignment programs in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky.
Both districts had argued that assigning students to schools based on race was necessary to ensure diversity and improve achievement among minority students. The ruling majority – the Court’s four conservatives plus Anthony Kennedy – said they failed to make that case.
The reason it was a 4.5 to 4 verdict, and not a vanilla 5 to 4, is that Kennedy hedged his bets, subscribing only to part of the majority’s opinion. Kennedy diverged from the conservatives in maintaining that race could theoretically be used for some purposes under some circumstances, and even suggested a few examples. None of them, however, were much like the racial assignment programs at issue in this case.
Pundits may make a big deal out of Kennedy’s “dissentagreement” ™, but so far many seem to be missing one of its crucial elements. He, like the conservatives, believes that a district needs to prove there is no racially neutral way of advancing the goals of diversity and minority student achievement before they can start moving black and white faces around like pawns on a chessboard.
And you know what? There IS a racially neutral alternative: school choice.
I went through the key relevant evidence on this when oral arguments were heard. The same still applies. A good school choice program including public and private schools would improve residential integration, increase meaningful integration within schools, improve minority student achievement, and improve minority student attainment (i.e., highest level of education achieved). All that in a racially neutral program that benefits all students. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too much longer for policymakers to realize this, for kids’ sake.
Heritage - Out of Energy
To many people, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation are closely related ideological siblings. This causes me no end of frustration. There are plenty of rather significant differences between us — health care, immigration, foreign policy, the War in Iraq, etc. — but even in areas where you would think we might agree, we often don’t. Like energy.
For instance, according to Heritage, the Ur-commandment for the federal energy policy is as follows:
Lawmakers should implement a long-term energy plan that balances supply and demand, ensures reliable and affordable supplies of energy for the future, and provides responsible stewardship of the nation’s resources.
To me, that smells of Soviet 5/10-year economic planning. If you really think a bunch of vote-maximizing politicians with no particular expertise in energy markets can competently execute those tasks, then God bless you. Me? I’d rather leave those tasks to the market, thank you very much.
Still, views over there are not monolithic. Ben Lieberman and I generally see eye-to-eye, but Ariel Cohen might as well be titled “Senior Research Fellow for Anti-Taylor Studies.” See, for instance, his worries about energy security and his support for turning Justice Department antitrust lawyers loose on OPEC.
The tension between the Lieberman and Cohen is palpable. Cohen, for instance, was generally happy with President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, which called for America to break its “addiction to oil.” Lieberman, on the other hand, was not. And some outside voices given a platform at Heritage muddy the waters further. For instance, Daniel Fine appears willing to entertain federal subsidies for oil shale development, and no one over there — to my knowledge — has said a discouraging word about Republican efforts to launch “Synfuels, Part Deux.” Read the rest of this post »
New Cato Paper on RomneyCare
Today, Cato releases a new paper on the Massachusetts health plan by David Hyman, a Cato adjunct scholar and professor of law & medicine at the University of Illinois. Hyman’s paper is titled, “The Massachusetts Health Plan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Although the legislation, as Stuart Altman put it, “is not a typical Massachusetts-Taxachusetts, oh-just-crazy-liberal plan,” there is enough “bad” and “ugly” in the mix to raise serious concerns, particularly when the desire to overregulate the health insurance market appears to be hard-wired into Massachusetts policymakers’ DNA…
If we want to make health insurance more affordable and avoid the “bad” and the “ugly” of the Massachusetts plan, Congress—or, barring that, individual states—should consider a “regulatory federalism” approach.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Regulatory Studies
Interview on Healthy Competition
Here’s a link to an audio interview I did on Healthy Competition for a Tampa-based newspaper called — I love this — Creative Loafing.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
It Dawns Upon Gore
This Fast Company profile of Al Gore (via Jim Henley) contains this delicious nugget:
One problem he had in politics, he says, was identifying an issue too early–”‘predawn’ is the term I use”–to be able to act on it. But “in the business world, particularly at a time when things are moving so swiftly, if you can see it early, you can make a business opportunity out of it.” He pauses. “For whatever reason, the business world rewards a long-term perspective more than the political world does.”
“For whatever reason”!
It may be that “predawn” Al Gore has killer entrepreneurial instincts, but, being the scion of a political family, just got caught in the wrong game. However, I suspect he landed on the board of Apple, for example, for reasons other than his proven track record as a market ace. And the $175,000 speakers fee may have something to do with his having won the popular vote in a contest against one of history’s most unpopular presidents. But we can only hope that Gore’s many new business ventures help create new wealth and earn him and a bunch of other people a ton of money. For whatever reason, the incentives provided by markets to look further in the future than the next election tend to do us all a lot of good.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Announcing the Anti-Universal Coverage Club
Inspired by National Review’s recent editorial and Andrew Sullivan’s embrace of same (as well as by Greg Mankiw), I have decided it would be fun and educational to keep tally of those who reject the idea that federal or state governments should strive to provide every American with health insurance. Call it the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.
Here are the guiding principles of the Anti-Universal Coverage Club:
- Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
- To achieve “universal coverage” would require either having the government provide health insurance to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it. Government provision is undesirable, because government does a poor job of improving quality or efficiency. Forcing people to get insurance would lead to a worse health-care system for everyone, because it would necessitate so much more government intervention.
- In a free country, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
- If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care, they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals, uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be forced by a policy of “universal coverage” to subsidize people via “insurance.”
If you’d like to join the Anti-Universal Coverage Club, let me know by posting something to your own blog, or by emailing me here. Feel free to forward items from other like-minded individuals.
I predict that neither the American Medical Association, nor the Federation of American Hospitals, nor America’s Health Insurance Plans will join the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
Lazy Leftists
A certain segment of the political left is, shall we say, lazy in its critique of letting consumers control their health care dollars and decisions.
For example, I recently wrote about my experience using my health savings account (HSA) to pay for medical care after I tore my anterior cruciate ligament. When my orthopedist learned that I faced a high deductible, he helped me weed out unncessary expenses that would provide little benefit. In particular, we skipped an X-ray because I didn’t hear or feel any bones break, and he agreed there (probably) would be no harm in doing so. The only reason I shared that information about my injury, indeed the only reason we gave the X-ray a second thought, was because I had a financial incentive to do so: I was paying for the X-ray.
Big deal, says Ezra Klein:
That’s all for the good, when it’s all for the good. On the other hand, that’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away from “She had shortness of breath, but no radiating arm pain, so she decided to wait through the weekend because she couldn’t afford the ambulance ride. She died.”
Here’s why that’s lazy.
Klein knows that when people face additional cost-sharing, some patients will forgo some medical care and some of those patients will end up less healthy. But he also knows that when people have HSA-like coverage, on balance, people do not end up less healthy. Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Cheney’s Secret Failure
The Washington Post has been running a huge series on the power and influence of Vice President Cheney. The first two parts examined his immense influence on the administration’s response to 9/11, “pushing the envelope” of presidential power (not to mention vice-presidential power) and crafting the administration’s position on the use of torture — or rather “cruel, inhuman or degrading” methods of questioning.
But the third part, although written with the same sinister soundtrack, tells a very different story. The Post reporters seem to want us to be alarmed by Cheney’s power over fiscal policy and by his relentless push to reduce the burdens of taxes and spending on the American people. But there’s a problem with that story: not only is fiscal conservatism a good thing — unlike, say, secret authorization for domestic surveillance — but if Cheney’s goal was to constrain spending, he failed utterly.
Jo Becker and Barton Gellman report on Cheney’s power over the budget:
Cheney has changed history more than once, earning his reputation as the nation’s most powerful vice president. His impact has been on public display in the arenas of foreign policy and homeland security, and in a long-running battle to broaden presidential authority. But he has also been the unseen hand behind some of the president’s major domestic initiatives….
And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters….
The vice president chairs a budget review board, a panel the Bush administration created to set spending priorities and serve as arbiter when Cabinet members appeal decisions by White House budget officials. The White House has portrayed the board as a device to keep Bush from wasting time on petty disagreements, but previous administrations have seldom seen Cabinet-level disputes in that light. Cheney’s leadership of the panel gives him direct and indirect power over the federal budget — and over those who must live within it….
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Government Makes Things Worse, Not Better
In this column, John Stossel eviscerates David Brooks, the ostensibly conservative columnist for the New York Times. Brooks has argued for big new government initiatives to boost human capital. Stossel correctly explains, though, that Brooks wants to expand failed government programs when the right approach is to move in the other direction:
David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.” Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition. Brooks writes that Hamiltonians like him “think government should help people get the tools they need to compete.” But when has government ever been good at that? He claims the state can “increase the quality of human capital” by, for example, providing “Quality preschool [to] help young children from … disorganized homes. … ” Really? What is the chance that it would be “quality” preschool if government runs it? Even the acclaimed Head Start has not been shown to have any lasting effect on academic performance. …When I asked Brooks why a government that performed as ineptly as FEMA did after Hurricane Katrina will be better at running preschools, he said, “Some lives are so screwed up, it’s hard to make them worse.” Government coercion almost always makes things worse. It discourages individual effort, and sucks capital away from more productive uses. …America became an economic power despite, not because of, Hamiltonian intervention. Hong Kong and much of East Asia went from abject poverty to affluence in a few decades not because their governments gave people “tools they need to compete” — they didn’t — but because they exercised limited powers.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Political Philosophy
Jurisdictional Competition is the Only Hope for Europe’s Taxpayers
A new report from the European Commission shows that the tax burden continues to climb. The only silver lining to this dark cloud is that tax competition is forcing politicians to lower corporate rates and to consider lowering tax rates on labor. A Dow Jones report notes that Eastern European nations are having a good effect since their low-rate tax systems are forcing reforms elsewhere in Europe:
Eurostat said the E.U.’s tax burden remained below the high of 41.0% reached in 1999. The tax burden last increased in 2003. Taxes on work rose to 35.2% from 35.1% in the E.U., and to 36.8% from 36.2% in the euro zone. Eurostat said the decline in labor taxes that began at the turn of the century had come to a halt “despite a wide consensus on the desirability of reducing labor taxes.” E.U. governments have agreed that persuading more Europeans to work is essential if the bloc is to remain economically competitive with the U.S. and Asia. Cutting taxes on work is seen as a vital step in that direction. Eurostat said that although taxes on work remained below the 2000 high of 36.5%, they are “much higher…than in the other main industrialized economies.” …there is growing evidence of tax competition between E.U. members that is pushing tax rates down. In general, new E.U. members from eastern Europe have lower top rates of income and corporation tax. Fearing that companies may move production to the new members, some older members of the E.U. have begun to cut corporation tax rates, including Germany and the U.K..
Is Efficient Government A Good Thing?
One of the behind-the-scenes initiatives of President Bush’s budget staff the past six years has been something called the Program Assessment Ratings Tool (PART) analysis. It’s an effort to measure the “effectiveness” and “efficiency” of nearly 1,000 federal programs. Each program is graded on how well it achieves its “goals,” with marks ranging from “effective” (the equivalent of an A grade) to “ineffective” (the equivalent of an F grade).
In Tuesday’s Investor’s Business Daily op-ed section, Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins take a look at the results to date of the effort:
Congress is about to wave its wand over nearly $1 trillion of additional “discretionary” spending that will, among other things, perpetuate or increase funding for nearly 500 expenditure programs that are not even “moderately effective,” according to the Office of Management and Budget. This includes more than 200 expenditure programs that have failing grades of D or F.
By our calculations, the OMB study, called Program Assessment Ratings Tool (PART), further reveals that on average more than half of all federal expenditure programs are falling about 50% short of their stated goals.
This means that out of every dollar spent, 50 cents may possibly be accomplishing something worthwhile, but the remaining 50 cents might as well have been poured down a rat hole. In these cases alone, the cost of government incompetence is over $250 billion per year.
The list of programs with the lowest grades might make any supporter of limited government point wildly and say, “Told you so!” This rogue’s gallery includes the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s pork-filled Community Development Block Grants, the Department of Education’s Even Start literacy program, and Amtrak. Read the rest of this post »
Chocolate Chutzpah
Americans love their chocolate. 
So it’s no surprise that one of the most-read pages currently on the New York Times‘ website is Monday’s op-ed decrying a proposal to change federal regulations on what can be legally labeled “chocolate.”
Under Food and Drug Administration regulations, “chocolate” must contain crushed cacao beans and may contain a short list of other ingredients, including spices, nuts, sweeteners, and dairy products. Confections that do not comply with those regulations cannot carry the “chocolate” label.
Some candymakers have petitioned the FDA to expand the list of allowable additives to include various fats. If that happens, chocolatiers could substitute cheaper vegetable oils for expensive cocoa butter — the fat in cacao beans that provides chocolate’s melt-in-your-mouth texture. By substituting away from cocoa butter, confectioners would lower their production costs, which would lead to greater profit margins or, if the candymakers compete on price, lower chocolate’s price to consumers.
To be clear, chocolatiers can already make this substitution, but the resulting product cannot legally be called “chocolate.” A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but “chocolate-like candy” apparently doesn’t sell as well as “chocolate.”
Andrew Sullivan Joins the Anti-Universal Coverage Club
…in this post, where he also critiques Michael Moore’s SiCKO. Sullivan writes:
[A]llowing individuals to own their own health insurance and carry it from job to job would be a more meaningful reform [than the Romney healthcare initiative] - and univeralism can be over-rated. On this, I’m in agreement with this National Review editorial.
Read the entire post.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Politics and Pricing
There are two ways to price products:
The market way, used for thousands of products for hundreds of years, and
the government way, used for certain politically favored products, such as milk, since the 1930s.
This is 2007. Don’t policymakers have enough experience yet to understand that one of these methods is simple, effective, and efficient, while the other is unfair, wasteful, and bureaucratic?
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Liberals, Conservatives, and Free Speech
Libertarians sometimes say that they are “liberal on free speech but conservative on economic freedom,” or that “liberals believe in free speech and personal freedom, while conservatives believe in economic freedom.” That proposition got another test in the Supreme Court yesterday. Conservatives and liberals split sharply on two free-speech cases.
And let’s see . . . in two 5-4 decisions, the Court’s conservative majority struck down some of the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaign speech and upheld a high-school principal’s right to suspend a student for displaying a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner. Liberals disagreed in both cases.
So the liberals strongly defend a student’s right to engage in nonsensical speech that might be perceived as pro-drug, but they approve a ban on speech criticizing political candidates in the 60 days before an election.
Now I’m for free speech in both these cases. But if you had to choose, which is more important–the right of a high-school student to display silly signs at school-sponsored events, or the right of citizen groups to criticize politicians at the time voters are paying attention? Political speech is at the core of the First Amendment, and conservatives are more inclined to protect it than are liberals. That’s a sad reflection on today’s liberals.
The liberal attitude toward speech is also on display on the front pages of our leading liberal newspapers. A banner headline in the Washington Post reads “5-4 Supreme Court Weakens Curbs on Pre-Election TV Ads/Ruling on McCain-Feingold Law Opens Door for Interest Groups in ‘o8.” This long headline mentions “TV Ads” and “Interest Groups” but never uses the words “speech” or “First Amendment.” But the sidebar on the high-school case is headed “Restrictions on Student Speech Upheld.” For that issue, a straightforward understanding that speech is involved. And the New York Times website leads with “Justices Loosen Ad Restrictions in Campaign Finance Law,” while the sidebar on the school case reads, “Vote against Banner Shows Divide on Speech in Schools.” Though I should note that the old-fashioned, tree-destroying version of the Times does have a subhead reading “Political Speech Rights.”
Maybe libertarians should try to describe their philosophy by saying “libertarians believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe in, and the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in.”