Archive for January, 2009
A Bailout for Larry Flynt?
Banks, car companies, home builders, ethanol scammers, and steel companies are among the industries and interest groups trying to stick their snouts in the public trough. Now another group is looking for a handout.
CNN reports:
Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.
College Football Star Highlights the Poverty of a Public Education Monopoly
The Washington Post has an interesting profile on University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, the first sophomore to win the Heisman, and possible winner of the national championship.
Probably the most striking thing about the young man is his unusual background; he was home-schooled by missionary parents who expected a lot from him and provided him with a host of interesting educational opportunities.
Tebow learned things that are impossible to teach in a public school, and not just the religious content. There is a strong secular-left thread in the home-school movement as well.
From the Post:
The more Tebow talks, the more it becomes apparent that almost everything he knows about leading a football team he’s learned away from the field. Many important lessons came in his parents’ home near Jacksonville . . . Others came on the ground in the Philippines, where Tebow traveled from village to village, talked to thousands of students and visited the four dozen children at the orphanage his father helps run on the island of Mindanao.
Pam Tebow said she geared her home-school lessons to her children’s interests, with an emphasis on public speaking to ensure they could effectively communicate their beliefs when they were older. . . [Bob Tebow] insisted the children tend to a half-acre garden — which provided nearly all of the vegetables for family meals — and dispose of fallen trees in the back yard as measures designed to teach discipline . . . All five children received college scholarships . . .
No two families are exactly the same and neither are any two children. And what works for one might not work for another. What a tragedy it is to strangle that variety with a one-size-fits-all, government-run educational system.
Home-schooled kids are winning science fairs, spelling bees and Heisman trophies. School choice works because educating kids isn’t an assembly-line process.
We need to help recover and expand a diversity of educational environments and let parents decide what works best for their children.
Chris Edwards Takes on Stimulus Packages
Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of Tax Policy Studies, appears on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss the “stimulus package” proposed by President-elect Obama.
More more on the subject from Chris Edwards, here’s 10 reasons to oppose stimulus packages for the states. (PDF)
Another Setback for Mayor Fenty
Just before the holidays, DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty tried to give his police chief sweeping subpoena powers, but the DC Council just thwarted that gambit. This comes shortly after the Supreme Court declared DC’s gun restrictions unconstitutional. Mayor Fenty and his awful attorney general, Peter Nickels, need to chill.
Senator Hatch Gets Less than a Mess of Pottage
With an expanded Democratic majority in Congress, Democrats are pushing to get the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives, instead of the nonvoting delegate that the District has, like Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. They have one powerful Republican ally, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He’s introducing the bill in the Senate along with Joe Lieberman.
Now Senator Hatch is a great constitutionalist. On his official website he writes
Adhering strictly to the Constitution and the system of government our Founders outlined is the best guarantee of the freedoms we cherish as Americans. We need legislators, judges, and citizens who understand the view of the Constitution envisioned by our Founding Fathers. . . .
Our Constitution is an inspired document that has preserved the unity of our nation, protected the rights of its citizens, and made America a beacon of freedom and prosperity for the world. I consider my pledge to defend the Constitution, and all that it stands for, to be among my most sacred duties.
But that poses a bit of a problem for his position on D.C. voting rights in Congress. Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution begins, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states.” The District of Columbia is not a state, and so it is not eligible to elect a member of the House of Representatives. Some constitutional issues are complicated. This one is not. States are represented in the House, and the District is not a state.
So why is Sen. Hatch (R-Utah) willing to ignore the clear language of the Constitution in order to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives? Because he’s made a political deal that would also give Utah another seat in Congress. That way, you see, the Democrats get another vote from the District, and the Republicans would likely pick up a new Utah seat. The excuse for this deal is that Utah narrowly lost a fourth seat in the 2000 redistricting, arguably because the Census Bureau excludes overseas missionaries from a state’s apportionment count. Utah produces lots of Mormon missionaries. So Congress would increase the number of seats in the House to 437, with the additional seats temporarily assigned to D.C. and Utah.
So this bill is blatantly unconstitutional. And what is Senator Hatch (along with Sen. Robert Bennett and the rest of the Utah delegation, except for new Rep. Jason Chaffetz) getting for this corrupt bargain? Another vote in the House of Representatives for two years. The bill would allow Utah and D.C. to elect representatives to the 112th Congress in November 2010. But Utah’s population growth almost certainly will result in its getting a fourth seat in the 2010 census anyway, so in the regular order of things it would have four seats in the 113th Congress elected in 2012. That means that all this whistling past the Constitution on the part of Utah’s members of Congress is to get one more vote for two years. Meanwhile, of course, the unconstitutional vote for the District of Columbia would be permanent.
It reminds me of the wonderful line from A Man for All Seasons when Sir Thomas More, thinking his friend Richard Rich has sold out his honor for very little, asks him (alluding to Matthew 16:26): “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
Senator Hatch and the state of Utah would trade the Constitution for one vote out of 437 for two years.
Who’s Blogging
- Examining the state of gun rights in the District of Columbia since the Heller case, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler quotes Cato Chairman Robert A. Levy on the American Constitution Society blog.
- Cato Senior Fellow Daniel J. Mitchell weighs in on Obama’s tax policy on The Hill’s Congress blog:
President-Elect Obama reportedly will include $300 billion of tax relief in his so-called stimulus scheme. This supposedly will give fiscal conservatives a reason to vote for the proposal, but lawmakers who favor limited government should look before they leap – especially if they actually want to improve economic growth.
- Fr33Agents.com, a blog devoted to following the liberty movement, embeds Cato’s new video, Downsizing the Federal Government. Tom Pearson writes:
As federal and state governments scramble to shore up the tanking economy by doing more of what got us to this point in the first place: meddling and spending, it will be interesting to see which government programs/expenditures, if any, get cut. No doubt budget conversations this year will be drastically different than last year’s, as expenditures and “services” deemed indispensable and essential last year suddenly don’t seem as necessary.
- Writing about the efficiency of private enterprise over public projects, Wayne Crews links to Cato’s recent study, Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence, on “Dysfunction Network.”
- Charles R. Anderson comments on Daniel J. Mitchell’s post, Obama Wants 600,000 More Bureaucrats on his blog, “Objectivist Individualist”
New Congress, New National ID Proposals
The new Congress came roaring out of the gate yesterday, with more than 350 new bills introduced. That should be enough for an entire two years, but they’re not likely to stop there.
Among many other subjects, Congress will consider creating “a secure Social Security card.” The idea is to protect seniors from identity theft, and the author of this legislation no doubt intends not to create a national ID. But the reality is that this would be a nationally uniform card made secure with a nationally standardized biometric, and it’s very likely that it would be administered with a national biometric database. That’s a national ID system, and it is a profound threat to American liberty.
You can learn a bit about identification and identification policy in my book, Identity Crisis.
Congress has also already seen a bill to mandate electronic employment eligibility verification. That can only be done through a national identity system, as I articulated in my paper: “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
And here’s a bill that would do both.
Welcome new Congress! Now go home.
A New Surgeon General, Why?
It appears that Barack Obama will name CNN health reporter Sanjay Gupta as the next US Surgeon General. Although I strongly disagree with Dr. Gupta on many issues, such as his support for national health care, he is probably as good a choice as any. But the bigger question is why do we need a surgeon general in the first place? After all, can anyone name our current (acting) surgeon general?
In reality, the surgeon general is little more than the “national nanny,” hectoring us to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise more, and never ever go out without a condom. I’ve been flipping through my copy of the Constitution, and I can’t find the authorization for the federal government to take taxpayers’ money to establish an office to tell us how we should live our lives. There are plenty of private groups that are fully capable of instructing us on how to be healthy, wealthy and wise without the government’s getting involved. The American Lung Association can tell us not to smoke. Alcoholics Anonymous can preach sobriety. The American Medical Association can lecture couch potatoes on the benefits of losing weight and exercising more. Planned Parenthood and the Family Research Council can fight it out over when and how we should have sex.
The surgeon general does oversee the Public Health Service. But we have a Department of Health and Human Services that is supposed to be running the government’s health care programs. Why not let HHS take over any useful functions of the Public Health Service and dump the rest, including the surgeon general?
President-Elect Obama says he wants to be a different type of president. Fair enough. Why not start by letting people live the way they want, without a surgeon general looking over our shoulder and nagging us.
Welcome Stephen Walt to the Blogosphere
I’m sorry to be late to this party, but it’s really great to see Stephen Walt blogging for Foreign Policy magazine. Walt is now clearly the most high-profile academic realist in the blogosphere, and it’s terrific he’s blogging. A lot of people like to call themselves realists inside the Beltway, but they’re basically all liberals, in IR terms. Actual realists have long been egregiously underrepresented in the American government, the American media, and basically everywhere in the U.S. outside the academy. More people need to hear realist voices. Realists wisely opposed the Iraq war, and have a host of ideas about how the world works that, if they gained greater sway in Washington, might help prevent the next couple of screw-ups the government is planning for us.
Here’s a good post from Walt on defense spending. Walt writes that you’d think, since the United States enjoys a terribly benign threat environment, just elected a liberal Democrat president, and is facing an economic meltdown, the bloated defense budget ought to be on the chopping block:
Here’s why it won’t happen any time soon. As Cindy Williams, former director of the National Security division of the Congressional Budget Office and now a senior research scientist at MIT, points out in an as-yet unpublished paper for the Tobin Project, DOD is insulated from serious cuts by an array of impressive political advantages. First, its budget is more than 50 percent of all federal discretionary spending, and its sheer size gives it a lot of bureaucratic clout. Second, the Pentagon has a large domestic constituency: there are 1.4 million men and women in uniform, 850,000 paid members of the National Guard and Reserve, and 650,000 civilian employees. Forget GM, Ford and Chrysler: the Department of Defense is the largest single employer in the whole country. Now add the companies that provide goods and services for the military. Their employees amount to about 5.2 million jobs, which is a pretty impressive domestic constituency. And don’t forget those 25 million veterans, who are hardly shrinking violets when defense spending is concerned. Finally, a well-financed group of Beltway bandits and Washington think tanks stand ready to question the patriotism of any politician (and especially any Democrat) who tries to put the Pentagon on a diet.
Matt Yglesias responds to this with a note of surprise, and then an endorsement:
It seems unlike a realist to cite domestic political dynamics as the cause of national security policy, but clearly this is correct.
This is a pretty common objection when realists talk about foreign policy, as opposed to international politics, but it belies a misunderstanding of the theory. Realists talk a lot about structure in the international political context: various structures of the balance of power push states in one direction or another. If Mexico were twice as powerful as the United States, different structural forces would be acting on us. Realists note that structures “shape and shove” but don’t determine foreign policies. Kenneth Waltz memorably wrote in 1997 that states “are free to do any fool thing they care to, but are likely to be rewarded for behavior that is responsive to structural pressures and punished for behavior that is not.”
One of the things that’s really curious about today’s world (and another about which Walt has written) is the strange condition of unipolarity. Given the size of the power disparity between the United States and, well, everybody else, there are few structural constraints acting on American policymakers. So one major input, structure, that should play a powerful role in constraining statesmen’s options, isn’t really working.
Thus far the results have been pretty disappointing. American policymakers have tended to expansionism, to recklessness, and to grand strategies based on trying to dominate the world. A (hopefully) interesting theoretical question I’m kicking around is, Under unipolarity, what constraints are acting, given that structure really isn’t, and is there any reason to believe that any of these constraints will start limiting American strategic options any time soon? If there are no binding constraints in sight, aren’t we very likely (destined?) to continue with the primacy strategy we’ve followed more or less since 1991?
Thus far, it seems like the domestic inputs that Walt and Cindy Williams point to have provided policymakers a completely blank slate to do anything they wish–except choose grand strategies based on restraint. A lot of us yearn for a strategy of restraint, but it seems to me that it’s going to take some pretty serious tinkering with domestic politics to get us there, given the factors described above and the absence of meaningful structural constraints. As it is, we’re dealing with fundamentally unchecked power. Which both realists and libertarians ought to be wary of.
The Timely Lesson of the “Bud Shuster Highway”
A bit over a week ago the New York Times ran a piece on the recent completion of the final 18-mile leg of Interstate 99 in central Pennsylvania. I-99 is known as the “Bud Shuster Highway” in honor of the legendary pork-barreling congressman responsible for securing the federal largess to build it. Federal budget hawks have more derisive labels for it such as “Bud Shuster’s Rollercoaster” and “The Road to Nowhere.” The latter nickname stings me personally as I grew up in Bud Shuster’s “Nowhere” district.
Nonetheless, critics of the highway who question why taxpayers in the other 49 states should pay for the powerful former House Transportation Committee Chairman’s vanity plate are correct. I recently traveled Bud Shuster’s highway for the umpteenth time over the holidays and often went a mile or two before seeing another vehicle. The fact of the matter is that had Bud Shuster not been the powerful chairman of said transportation committee, this road does not become interstate-anything.
It strikes me that I-99 is a perfect example of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats, rather than private enterprise, are tasked with economic development. I’ll just point out three illuminating bites from the Times piece, but a google search on Bud Shuster or his highway will provide plenty more sordid details for those interested.
First, more evidence for Edwards’ Budget Law:
At $631 million, including $83 million to clean up toxic pyritic rock that was the result of a 35-million-year-old meteor impact, this section of I-99 was nearly twice as expensive as anticipated and took at least four years longer than expected to finish.
Second, a lesson in the arrogance and disregard for the rules so commonly displayed by politicians:
…[W]hen he [Shuster] was told that the highway would officially be considered a “spur” connecting I-76 and I-80 and would have to be named something like Interstate 876 or Interstate 280, he resisted because, he said, it was not “catchy.” So, reaching into his childhood memories of the old rickety street car, No. 99, that took people from his hometown of Glassport, Pa., to McKeesport, he wrote into law that it would be called I-99, believed to be the first time that was ever done. That violated the highway numbering protocol the federal government usually uses for Interstates, which requires north-south highway numbers to rise from lower in the west, like Interstate 5, to higher in the east, like Interstate 95.
Third, no need to worry about the details when taxpayers are footing the bill:
By deciding to go over the mountain, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation cut into an acidic pyrite rock formation. The department had anticipated that, but its studies had failed to accurately calculate how much pyrite there was, and how “hot,” or acidic, it was…so acidic that when exposed to air and water, the runoff had the pH level of battery acid. The state spent two years and $83 million digging up more than one million cubic yards of the pyrite-laden rock and created a lined landfill next to the highway, mixing a larger-than-normal amount of limestone in to neutralize it and then covering it over with more fill.
Not a day goes by now that politicians and their willing accomplices don’t cry out for billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed “stimulus” to deal, in part, with “our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.” Yet, the Bud Shuster Highway provides a timely lesson on how we can expect our legislators to “invest” our money on the nation’s infrastructure. As Cato’s Chris Edwards and Peter Van Doren recently put it:
The main problem with current government infrastructure spending is not its magnitude but its lack of efficiency. More roads and transit capacity may or may not make sense depending on whether the benefits exceed the costs. One sure way to find out is to have private provision and user charges. If users are not willing to pay the costs of extra or newer capacity, then calls for taxpayer involvement probably imply subsidy of some at the expense of others rather than efficiency.
PBS in Action
I got a fundraising letter at home, an all-green envelope with a silhouetted tree and the stark message:
This is no time to fool with our planet… AN URGENT OFFER INSIDE
An environmentalist organization, of course.
But not exactly. In fact, it was a fundraising letter from MPT, which did not quite tell me anywhere that that stands for Maryland Public Television, a television network owned and operated by the State of Maryland. The letter continued in that vein: “no time to take our planet for granted . . . understand the stakes . . . cannot afford a community and nation ignorant of science.” Sounds like Maryland Government Television knows which side is right in the heated scientific, economic, and political debates over environmental issues.
True, they do promise to use their “unique ability” to “bring our community real science with no political agenda, news reporting with diverse perspectives, and programs that teach kids conservation values.” But has anybody ever seen a PBS/MPT documentary on the high costs of environmental regulation? Or the fact that the globe hasn’t warmed for the past 10 years? Or the way that markets lead to better environmental amenities? Not really a lot of diverse perspectives, as the general tenor of the letter would suggest.
MPT’s fundraising letter seems to acknowledge clearly its function: To raise money from liberals, to supplement the tax money raised from people of all political perspectives, to advance one side of controversial issues. In a world of 500 channels, why are we taxing people to support one side in a broad political debate?
“Friendly” Health Care Debate on PBS
As I blogged last fall, I had the opportunity to participate in a Fred Friendly Seminar on the future of health care reform. Hosted by NYU law professor Arthur Miller, the program featured — in addition to me — AARP CEO Bill Novelli, former U.S. Comptroller General Dave Walker, Washington Post Bureau Chief T.R. Reid, and Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, along with family doctors, business owners, hospital administrators, and health policy experts in a lively debate over how to control health care costs, expand access, and improve the quality of care. That debate will be broadcast by PBS the week of January 18. For information on when it can be seen in your area, click here.
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