Archive for January, 2009
Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts
The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service collectively manage well over a quarter of the land in the United States. Several Cato Institute studies have called for privatization of these public lands, but this idea is strongly resisted by environmentalists, recreationists, and others. A new paper from Cato scholar Randal O’Toole suggests an alternative policy: turn them into fiduciary trusts. Under this proposal, the U.S. would retain title to the lands, but the rules under which they would be governed would be very different.
- “A Matter of Trust: Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts,” by Randal O’Toole
Dear Leader
Two recent items in the “Cultwatch” category:
NPR has audio of an Atlanta student chorus that will be singing at the inaugural festivities. “Dear Obama hear us sing/we’re ready for the change that you will bring…” (hat tip: David Boaz)
And here’s video of some 800 Chicago elementary school students whose teachers had them form a 150-foot human portrait of the president-elect’s face:
(hat tip: Matt Welch)
Someone Is Feeling the Pinch
New York Times: “Chávez Lets West Make Oil Bids as Prices Plunge”
No wonder. According to a study by the Deutsche BanK, Venezuela needs the barrel of oil to stay above $97 in order to pay for government expenditures. It is currently traded at below $40 per barrel.
Questions for Mr. Holder
Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a confirmation hearing for Eric Holder, Obama’s nominee for Attorney General. Here are some questions for Mr. Holder:
1. You admit you made mistakes with respect to how you handled the pardon for Mark Rich. Why do you think he was pardoned? You are a former prosecutor and investigator–do you believe there was a corrupt bargain of some kind?
2. You and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the violent raid by federal agents to take custody of Elian Gonzales. Did you know in advance that agents waited until the judge familiar with the case left the courthouse for the day and then applied for a warrant from the evening magistrate, who was not as familiar with the circumstances of the case? Did you know that federal agents used tear gas against peaceful protestors outside the home of Elian’s relatives?
3. You have testified in favor of federal hate crimes legislation. Where in the Constitution do you find authority for Congress to enact such legislation? What is your view of the Tenth Amendment? What federal criminal laws (enacted or proposed) fall outside of the purview of the limited and enumerated powers of Congress?
4. In 2000, the Department of Justice maintained that the Second Amendment to the Constitution does not really guarantee the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. The government can, in its discretion, take guns away from the citizenry. Is that your view? You did sign on to an amicus brief in the Heller case that defended the draconian gun control regulations of Washington, D.C.
5. If a federal law enforcement agent for the FBI or DEA is involved in a questionable shooting and local prosecutors come to the conclusion that the law was broken and bring murder or manslaughter charges, will your department argue for blanket immunity from prosecution? During the Clinton years, the Justice Department argued that federal agents “are privileged to do what would otherwise be unlawful if done by a private citizen.” Do you think federal agents are immune from murder statutes?
6. In Mahoney v. Babbitt, 105 F.3d 1452 (1997), you signed a brief that took a bizzare view of free speech rights. You argued that people who support Bill Clinton could bring signs along the inaugural parade route, but that people who disliked Bill Clinton could be denied permits to bring signs to express their point of view. Where did you get that from? You say that as attorney general you would follow not only the letter but the spirit of the law, but your record does not support that.
Laudable Economic Stimulus Plan in Mexico
While the United States and many other countries flirt with the idea of raising barriers to trade, our enlightened neighbor to the south has a more promising response to the global economic contraction.
On January 2, the Calderon administration initiated a plan (discussed here; HT to Scott Lincicome) to unilaterally reduce tariff rates on about 70 percent of the items on its tariff schedule. Those 8,000 items comprising 20 different industrial sectors accounted for about half of all Mexican import value in 2007. When the final phase of the plan is implemented on January 1, 2013, the average industrial tariff rate in Mexico will have fallen from 10.4% to 4.3%.
The objectives of the plan are to reduce business operating costs, attract and retain foreign investment, raise business productivity, and provide consumers a greater variety and better quality of goods and services at competitive prices. Perhaps our free trade advocacy is having a positive impact on public policy after all. I suspect those objectives are very well served by the plan.
Mexico is no stranger to unilateral trade liberalization—so they’re not just grasping at straws here. This is a tried and true approach to economic growth in Mexico and throughout the world. Many of the reforms Mexico agreed to in the North American Free Trade Agreement were already undertaken before the NAFTA went into effect in 1994. They were undertaken with the same objectives in mind. So, Mexico has some experience and credibility on the issue of the benefits of unilateral trade liberalization.
Let’s hope the rest of the world is watching, if not waiting in the wings.
Now’s the Time To Pass School Choice
Gov. Mark Sanford is really on a roll lately, decrying and rejecting bailouts and now recommitting to real education reform. From the Beaufort Gazette:
The Republican governor highlighted four priorities in education reform: enacting funding that “follows the child,” charter school funding, school choice, and access to higher education.
Of course, the government school fanatics are trying to head him off again. Rep. Kenneth Hodges, D-Green Pond, for instance, thinks “now is not the time to toy around with school choice again… not in the environment that we are in now.”
Hmm. Fiscal problems, slow economy, and school choice has been shown over and over to save money. In fact, a large-scale program could save South Carolina taxpayers over $1 billion.
It’s the perfect time to pass a robust education tax credit system in South Carolina, or anywhere else for that matter.
A Question for Christian Brose
In a post at Foreign Policy magazine, former Condoleezza Rice speechwriter Christian Brose points to his participation in the drafting of a Rice speech that I’ve long found vexing. The passage I found most puzzling was this:
American Realism is an approach to the world that arises not only from the realities of global politics but from the nature of America’s character: From the fact that we are all united as a people not by a narrow nationalism of blood and soil, but by universal ideals of human freedom and human rights. We believe that our principles are the greatest source of our power. And we are led into the world as much by our moral ideas as by our material interests. It is for these reasons, and for many others, that America has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power, but a revolutionary power – a nation with New World eyes, that looks at change not as a threat to be feared, but as an opportunity to be seized.
Emphasis mine. Suffice it to say that this is not the conventional view by historians of American diplomacy. It is a revisionist view that has been advanced mostly by those on the extreme left and extreme right. Those on the left generally believed that the economic concept of the Open Door thrust America ever outward, in search of markets for its products and to deploying force to feed the machine of American capitalism. The right-wing interpretation basically agrees with this economically deterministic view but also overlays what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call a “neoconservative” ideological orientation onto basically the entire history of American foreign policy. Kagan, for example, interprets the foreign policy vision of the Founders as being in general alignment with the view that it would be a good idea for the United States to unravel and reweave the social and political fabric of the Middle East.
It would be really interesting for Brose to explain what he and Rice meant by this. Was it an endorsement of the Kagan interpretation of American diplomatic history? Does Brose really place the revolutionary character of American diplomacy before, say, 1898? What does he think about the book his Foreign Policy colleague Aaron Friedberg wrote about the role anti-state American ideology played in preventing the United States from even becoming a player on the world stage, much less a “revolutionary power” before 1945? (Cf., Fareed Zakaria.)
Moreover, if, as Brose and Rice argue, the United States has “always been a revolutionary power,” wouldn’t it necessarily follow, for example, that Soviet diplomacy from 1945 onward was fundamentally defensive and that the Cold War was, itself, an American creation? After all, how, if we were always a revolutionary power should the Soviets have responded after we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan and began aiming our rhetorical sights on them?
Porqué Amo La Raza
Several months ago, the National Council of La Raza convened a group of health care wonks to help that organization make up its mind about how Congress should reform the tax treatment of health care. The wonks included people from Harvard University, the Urban Institute, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Families USA, the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and elsewhere.
La Raza took the unusual step of inviting a libertarian (me) to be part of that discussion, despite our divergent views. Where La Raza wants to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, for example, I advocate repealing SCHIP. I’m glad they invited me; it was one of the most enjoyable policy discussions I’ve ever had.
La Raza took the further unusual step of publishing a transcript of that discussion. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a libertarian in the very un-libertarian world of health care policy — and you know you have — I recommend giving it a read. Oh, and you’ll also learn a lot about health policy from a lot of smart people.
Here is the final product of those deliberations, La Raza’s policy paper on health tax incentives, in which La Raza plugs (without endorsement) my proposal for large health savings accounts.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health Care; Trade and Immigration
Please Do Our Job, Congress Begs Executive Branch
At the Senate hearing on the nomination of Lisa Jackson to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Sen. Barbara Boxer pressed Jackson to regulate coal ash in the wake of two spills in Alabama and Tennessee. “You have the authority to regulate this,” Boxer told Jackson.
And, Boxer warned, if the unelected bureaucracy at EPA doesn’t issue a regulation soon, Congress just might have to legislate: “If we are not satisfied with action, we may move legislatively.”
As it happens, Article I, section 1, of the U.S. Constitution stipulates, ‘‘All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.’’ And as David Schoenbrod and Jerry Taylor wrote in the Cato Handbook for Congress:
For the first 150 years of the American Republic, the Supreme Court largely upheld the original constitutional design, requiring that Congress rather than administrators make the law. The suggestion that Congress could broadly delegate its lawmaking powers to others— particularly the executive branch— was generally rejected by the courts.
Today the chair of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee tells a nominee for a position in the executive branch that if the bureaucracy won’t exercise Congress’s powers, Congress just may have to. (I’m not addressing here whether regulation of coal ash is a good idea, just the question of who should issue important and costly regulations.)
Of course, this comes a couple of weeks after President Bush said that if Congress wouldn’t give taxpayers’ money to General Motors and Chrysler, he would. In effect, his last grab for executive power was the power to appropriate money from the public fisc. But as Gene Healy pointed out, even here Congress was as much at fault as the president: it had effectively given him carte blanche in the TARP legislation, just as it did in the authorization for the Iraq war.
Congressional spinelessness is at least as big a factor as presidential arrogance in the rise of executive power.
Our Latest Salvo in the Battle Over Campaign Finance ‘Reform’
Today we filed an amicus brief in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, an election regulation/campaign finance case that will be argued before the Supreme Court in March or April. Testing the bounds of the Court’s landmark decision in Wisconsin Right to Life II (WRTL II), the Federal Election Commission recently sought to apply certain prohibitions and disclosure requirements of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 to advocacy group Citizens United’s political documentary, Hillary: The Movie, and to the group’s broadcast advertisements for the film. Though the FEC conceded that the ads, at least, are not the functional equivalent of express campaign advocacy, as defined in WRTL II, it nevertheless determined that Citizens United must disclose the identities of its contributors.
Cato’s brief argues that BCRA violates the First Amendment freedom of association belonging to those contributors, which freedom includes the right to associate anonymously and to control the group’s character and message free from government intervention. For groups engaging in political speech, compelled disclosure of contributors’ identities infringes their freedom of private expressive association, a burden often no less severe than direct restraint of the group’s speech. This type of government action must be subject to strict constitutional scrutiny—a level of scrutiny that in practice is almost always fatal. The district court failed to afford sufficient value to associational rights and so failed to scrutinize appropriately BCRA’s unjustified infringement on those rights.
Did the New Deal ‘Help’?
While Barack Obama’s economics team hammers out its $800 billion fiscal stimulus plan, the commentariat is battling over the effectiveness of what some consider the prototype stimulus package, the New Deal.* The suppressed (and problematic) conclusion to all this punditry seems to be: Because government spending under the New Deal helped/didn’t help to end the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus plan will/won’t help to end the current recession.
One of the opening salvos was this exchange between George Will (anti-New Deal) and Paul Krugman (pro). More recently, New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen (pro) wrote this column, responding to an op-ed by former Business Week bureau chief Andrew Wilson (anti) in the Wall Street Journal.
So who’s right? Did New Deal government spending “help,” as Cohen puts it?
To answer that, we first have to define Cohen’s term — what would it mean to say that government spending under the New Deal “helped”? Two possibilities come to mind:
- New Deal spending boosted consumption, thereby increasing production, reducing unemployment, and ending the Depression.
- New Deal spending aided people who would have otherwise been destitute during the Depression.
The first sense considers the New Deal as a stimulus program to revive the economy; the second considers it as a welfare program to aid the poor. The two notions are far from equivalent. My reading of the literature suggests that the New Deal did little as an economic stimulus, but it did provide welfare benefits.
Read the rest of this post »
What Is It Good For? Centralizing Power.
The Politico reports that Vice President-elect Joe Biden has been comparing our current economic troubles to the 9/11 attacks.
“We’re at war,” Biden told congressional leaders of both parties during their sit-down with Barack Obama in the Capitol, according to two sources familiar with the exchange.
Libertarians and conservatives who fear that Obama’s inauguration heralds the coming of a new New Deal have new cause for discomfort, then. FDR’s embrace of the war metaphor was central to building support for the New Deal:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in a landslide in 1932, wasn’t the only political figure to analogize America’s economic collapse to an attack by a hostile power; his predecessor Hoover had made the comparison regularly. F.D.R. employed the war metaphor far more effectively, however. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address tends to be remembered as an attempt to calm the public, a warning against “fear itself.” The martial metaphors that appear throughout the speech make clear, though, that F.D.R. wanted fear replaced by collectivist ardor. Americans were to move forward as “a trained and loyal army,” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” Should the normal balance of legislative and executive powers prove insufficient, Roosevelt concluded, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis–broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
Two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt used the Trading with the Enemy Act to order the closure of all American banks. Passed during World War I, the act was designed to restrict trade with hostile foreign powers “during the time of war.” Ignoring that limitation, Roosevelt wielded it in peacetime against Americans. It would not be the last time his administration would invoke powers forged in the Great War to battle the Depression. “Progressives turned instinctively to the war mobilization as a design for recovery,” wrote historian William Leuchtenburg in his essay “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I.”
Of course, viewing anything Joe Biden says as an example of calculated rhetoric may be a mistake. As the character Hesh Rabkin once noted of the Sopranos matriarch Livia, “Between brain and mouth there is no interlocutor.”
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