Archive for January, 2009
Upcoming Book Forum: Jefferson’s Moose
You wouldn’t think that a book called In Search of Jefferson’s Moose could be about the Internet, but it is.
In his book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, Temple University Law Professor David Post draws remarkable and entertaining parallels between the Internet and the natural and intellectual landscape that Thomas Jefferson explored, documented, and shaped.
Post will be at the Cato Institute for a lunch-hour book forum on Wednesday, February 4th. Clive Crook and Jeffrey Rosen will comment.
Register here to see just how nicely Thomas Jefferson, cyberspace, and a rather large moose fit between the covers of Post’s new book.
Close Guantanamo Bay
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Legal Policy Analyst David H. Rittgers explains why President Obama’s order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center will serve the fight against terrorism. Rittgers, who served three tours of service in Afghanistan as a special forces officer, says the move to close Gitmo couldn’t come at a better time.
In his own words:
Using closed courts to try suspected terrorists plays the propaganda game in exactly the way our enemies want, and cheapens American justice on the world stage. Terrorism and insurgency constitute violence with a message. To effectively counter terrorists, we must provide a message of our own that denies a propaganda victory to their cause. Meting sound and irreproachable justice is an important way to do that.
While serving as a Special Forces officer in Afghanistan, I took into account the Taliban’s propaganda purposes when planning operations. They didn’t need to kill us to win a small victory. They needed to shoot at us and run away to tell the tale, where fishing stories of exaggerated casualties could encourage ever larger groups of radicalized fighters to attack the Afghans and their American allies.
Solving the Evolution Question
The Texas state board of education is currently engaged in a debate over science standards and how to teach evolution in public schools, the Associated Press reports.
In a recent Cato policy analysis, Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict [pdf], Associate Director of Education Policy Studies Neal McCluskey examines the root cause of the debate, and how to fix it.
McCluskey writes:
Ultimately, the problem in Texas isn’t whether or not the theory of evolution has weaknesses, or whether pointing to such weakness is religiously or scientifically motivated. The problem is that the public schooling system requires everyone in the state to fund schools that take a single view, resulting in divisive conflict in the short-term and erosion of liberty in the long. Add to this that government-mandated orthodoxy is inherently incompatible with free inquiry, and it is clear that what Texas needs isn’t to decide what everyone will learn, but how to give everyone the ability to choose where and how their children will be educated.
For more on solutions to America’s troubled education system, check out McCluskey’s book, Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education.
The Future of Free Ice Cream and How to Stop It
I’m reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and I’m having a hard time granting plausibility to the book’s thesis. Zittrain writes as follows:
As ubiquitous as Internet technologies are today, the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. This counterrevolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity — and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability. (p. 8 )
As examples, he contrasts the Apple II, a classic of early personal computing, to the iPhone of today. The first is wide-open to outside development, insecure, not always dependable, and susceptible to hacking by both friendly and unfriendly parties. The second is sterile, secure, and, we are told, entirely under the thumb of a now much more sinister corporation. Unless we do something, that corporation’s control over information technology will, he believes, quickly morph into state control as well. Zittrain seeks a world that is open to the personal computer, which he views as as a device that enables a particular computing ethos — one of open, freewheeling exchange and innovation. The iPhone represents that world’s antithesis, and the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it.
Although I’m certainly concerned about civil liberties and privacy issues on the Internet, I have a lot of questions about Zittrain’s thesis.
The Guantanamo Bubble Pops
Within a day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, he has asked the military commissions judges to halt all trials in Guantanamo. All indications point toward detainees being tried in federal courts. This is a good decision for a couple of reasons.
First, the military commissions play into the propaganda game that terrorists thrive on. It confirms their message that normal courts can’t address the threat that they pose. In fact, the opposite is true. When you convict a terrorist and lock him up with murderers and rapists, you take away his freedom fighter mystique.
Second, the trial of Omar Khadr was about to start. Khadr fought alongside a band of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and allegedly killed Special Forces medic Christopher Speer with a hand grenade. Khadr deserves to be locked up, and letting his military commission trial start would create a Double Jeopardy issue if we interrupt the proceedings somewhere down the road and move him to federal court.
President Obama is also circulating a draft order for the closing of detainee operations at Guantanamo. The memo sets a 12 month deadline for deciding whether to try, release, or continue holding each detainee. Good move.
Cuba: 50 Years Later
January marks 50 years since the Cuban Revolution. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Project Coordinator for Latin America Juan Carlos Hidalgo discusses Fidel Castro’s takeover, the result of the revolution and offers advice to the Obama administration on reengaging with the small island nation.
“Cuba went from being one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest,” Hidalgo says. “After 50 years, the revolution has failed the Cubans.”
Behold Your Government in Action
The U.S. Senate is a busy place. Lately it has been spending billions and billions over and above the trillions in unfunded liabilities. Given all this activity, who would have imagined that the senators could find the time to pass a resolution about the emergency plane landing in the Hudson river in New York?
I’m not a historian or political science expert, but this Senate is clearly determined to be the very best we have ever had. What a record pace they are setting!
House GOP Insists Pelosi Hold States to Same Bailout Rules as the Big Three
Here’s an excerpt from a letter that House Republicans sent today to Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
We applaud your recent decision to require the “Big Three” automakers to submit a restructuring plan to Congress before either chamber would consider legislation providing additional federal aid to the auto industry. Unfortunately, the $87 billion allocated for more Medicaid money for states doesn’t appear to hold them accountable for ensuring that the tax dollars are spent wisely. Similar to what was requested of the automakers, we believe it is necessary to require our nation’s Governors to submit formal budget plans for their respective Medicaid programs detailing how additional funds will be spent before Congress considers any legislation to provide a temporary increase in the federal Medicaid match.
Seems reasonable, especially since the states’ irresponsible behavior is what got them into this mess in the first place.
The governors will probably squeal over such a requirement, which would indicate either that they have no plans for how to spend the money or that they would rather not share their plans publicly.
Pentagon 1, Obama 0
Planning for the 2010 federal budget began in 2008. The Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies to prepare documents for the incoming administration showing “current services baselines” and program estimates for the coming fiscal year. That means “just explain what you’re spending now and project it forward for next year.” The idea was to allow the Obama appointees to shape the budgets quickly when they came into office.
The Pentagon, however, went through its normal budgeting process. It produced a budget that defied existing plans and expectations that FY 2009 would be the last year of the massive defense buildup that began in the last years of the Clinton administration. It adds $60 billion to the defense baseline above FY 2009 levels and $450 billion in planned spending over five years.
Many observers saw this as an attempt at a bureaucratic fait accompli, a move to lock the Obama administration into higher defense spending. According to this week-old story from CongressDaily, it worked. Megan Scully writes:
President-elect Obama’s choice for the no. 2 civilian slot at the Pentagon Thursday said he does not plan to make sweeping changes to the Defense Department’s fiscal 2010 budget request, which has been drafted.
When Obama decided to keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, I asked whether we were keeping this defense budget and suggested that doing so would show that Obama will let the military services (who largely control the drafting of their budgets) push him around. For some time, the position of Democrats has been to give the Pentagon what it wants, either for fear of opening a line of attack for Republicans or because of agreement on the virtue of massive defense budgets.
This story suggests that little has changed. The FY 2010 increase will make any future decrease harder to achieve for political and programmatic reasons. This is one more sign that Obama’s occasional talk of realism and restraint in foreign and defense policy should not be taken seriously.
Clearly, the idea of scrubbing the budget “line by line” does not apply to agencies run in Virginia.
The Obamacare to Come…
In Barack Obama’s inaugural address, he once again made it clear that he intends to fix our “too costly” health care system in order to “raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” This is to be expected. Then-candidate Obama made health care reform a major issue during the campaign, and his actions since—such as naming former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle as both Secretary of Health and Human Services and White house “health czar”—suggest that health care reform remains at the top of his agenda.
But what will Obamacare look like? The president has not yet released a plan, but from his campaign statements, the plan outlined by Senate finance committee chairman Max Baucus, a bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Secretary Daschle’s book, it’s possible to glimpse at the basic components.
Mandates: Almost certainly President Obama will propose a mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to their workers. There may or may not be an exemption for small business or some type of tax credit to offset costs. And, while President Obama opposed an individual mandate during the campaign, all the other Democratic plans embrace such a requirement, and the logic of President Obama’s plan leads inexorably toward an individual mandate.
Minimum Benefits Package: Both President Obama and congressional Democrats have long supported a requirement that all insurance plans offer a standard minimum package of benefits.
Regulation: All the Democratic plans call for a host of new regulation on insurers, including insurers to accept all applicants regardless of their health (guaranteed issue) and would forbid insurers from basing insurance premiums on risk factors such as health or age (community rating). There may also be a requirement that insurers pay out a minimum amount of premiums in benefits.
Subsidies: Low- and likely middle-income Americans will be subsidized. The changes in the SCHIP program passed by the House earlier this week, allowing states to subsidize children from families earning up to 400 percent of the poverty level, suggests the direction that any reform bill will take.
Imposed Cost-Effectiveness: Secretary Daschle, in particular, has called for a government panel to study the comparative effectiveness of various treatments and establish standards of practice for providers. A key battle will be over whether these standards become mandatory, effectively denying patients a full choice of treatments.
A Government-Plan: Both the president and leading Democratic health reformers embrace the concept of a government health care program similar to Medicare operating in competition with private health insurance.
The net result of a plan based on these concepts will be a system in which, while privately-owned health insurance will continue to exist, the government makes all the important decisions. As my colleague Michael Cannon has pointed out, that’s “socialized medicine” no matter how it is disguised. And, it is bad news for American patients, health care providers, and taxpayers.
Can We Afford All This Spending? No We Can’t.
President Obama says that “our economy is badly weakened,” partly because of “our collective failure to make hard choices.” And that when government programs don’t work, “programs will end.” Yet he continues to press for a spending program that apparently only begins at $825 billion.
In 1993 a Democratic Congress failed to pass President Clinton’s request for a $16.3 billion stimulus package. A year ago Congress passed a $150 billion stimulus bill proposed by President Bush, a fitting cap to Bush’s massive increase in federal spending.
It had no apparent effect.
And now, in a continuing ratcheting up of spending levels, President Obama and Congress propose to spend the not-very-long-ago unimaginable sum of roughly a trillion dollars. As Chris Edwards wrote recently, we’re already looking at deficits of two trillion dollars in fiscal years 2008 and 2009. If that much deficit spending doesn’t do the Keynesian trick, do we really expect that another trillion dollars will?
Political leaders talk about making the hard choices and laying the groundwork for the future, but their actions demonstrate a different approach. They try to solve problems — or at least to be seen to be solving problems — today without in fact thinking about the long term.
Where will this new spending come from? It could come from raising taxes; but even President Obama seems reluctant to raise taxes during a sharp economic slowdown, indicating that he does know that taxes reduce work, investment, and production. And would anyone propose to raise taxes by $825 billion? Or by the $3 trillion that it would take to cover the already-projected deficits and the current proposed spending? And of course money taxed away from those who earn it is taken out of the economy, only to be reinjected by politicians and planners rather than by consumers and investors. That means, as the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, “It will fall to Obama and his subordinates to decide winners and losers in the banking, financial services, automobile and other major industries, a span of control that dwarfs President Harry S. Truman’s attempt to seize control of steel production.” That’s not good for freedom or for economic growth.
Is the New Obama Administration Walking Away from Transparency Already?
The new Whitehouse.gov went live shortly after Barack Obama became president yesterday. It has much of the look and feel of his transition Web site, Change.gov.
Among the featured items on the homepage today (they will change regularly, of course) is the site itself and the new administration’s commitment to transparency. However, the actual terms of that commitment come up pretty anemic.
In a post on the White House blog, Director of New Media Macon Phillips says:
President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Executive orders and proclamations? Information about senior leadership and the president’s priorities? That’s not breaking any new ground on transparency.
The transition’s “Seat at the Table” program required “any documents from official meetings with outside organizations [to] be posted on our website for people to review and comment on.”
The decision to port this practice over to the White House has either not been made, or has been decided against. Given that meetings are already happening, it will be a tough policy to implement if it is not implemented right away.
There is an “Office of Public Liaison” (and intergovernmental affairs) on the Whitehouse.gov site, but it’s nothing more than an email submission form at this point. “More ways for you to interact” are promised.
Words aren’t deeds, and it’s already too late to demonstrate a day-one commitment to transparency. Let’s hope the first steps of the new administration are not steps away from the important transparency precedents set by the transition.
Update: As this post was being written and edited, news stories were coming out about new executive orders dealing with ethics and transparency. Though I haven’t been able to find them yet – hint hint, Whitehouse.gov – the change to the interpretation of FOIA sounds like a welcome, though modest, step in the right direction.
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