Archive for April, 2009

Stop the War, Stop the Spending

Posted by David Boaz

One of the great things about Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was its cross-ideological appeal. Libertarians, free-market conservatives, and antiwar young people all found his candidacy appealing. As someone who has despaired for years about the split between free-marketers and civil libertarians, who ought to be part of the same broad freedom movement, I looked forward to seeing that combination continue. So here’s a suggestion.

President Obama’s frightening tax-spend-and-take-over-private-businesses policies are re-energizing a free-enterprise constituency that had been depressed and dispirited by the reality of a Republican government giving us bigger, more expensive government for eight years. Cato’s full-page newspaper ads against the “stimulus” bill generated much enthusiasm and media discussion. CNBC’s Rick Santelli and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford have become folk heroes for speaking out against Obama’s economic policies. Now there are anti-tax “tea parties” planned in more than 300 cities. The growing resistance to Obama’s spending agenda is encouraging.

But meanwhile, where’s the antiwar movement? President Obama rose to power on the basis of his early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. Now he has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to keep the war in Iraq going for another 19 months, after which we will have 50,000 American troops in Iraq for as far as the eye can see. If McCain had proposed this sort of minor tweaking of the Bush policy, I think we’d see antiwar rallies in 300 cities. Calling the antiwar movement!

So here’s my suggestion. Some libertarian group — which may or may exist already; the Internet makes it amazingly easy to organize a new group at a moment’s notice — should start a campaign to unite the antitax and antiwar constituencies with a simple message:

Stop the War, Stop the Spending

Or maybe it should be “Stop the Wars, Stop the Spending.” But it would pick up on Ron Paul’s appeal with his TV ads in which he said, “I’m the only presidential candidate who’ll bring our troops home from Iraq immediately and stop wasteful government spending.” Millions of Americans are tired of the war and worried about soaring federal spending. Somebody should give them a rallying point.

Cuban Agents Beat Up Young Dissident (and ElCato.org Contributor)

Posted by Juan Carlos Hidalgo

A year and a half ago I had the opportunity to travel to Cuba and meet with a group of young dissidents. Despite their early age, these guys had already suffered enormously the rigors of their totalitarian government. One of them had been imprisoned four times for his political activism. Constant official harassment was their daily life. But they remain unrepentant about their desire for liberty.

I’m still in touch with one of the guys I met that day, a young independent journalist. Every week he sends me articles and newsletters reporting instances of human rights abuses, lack of opportunities for young people, and how life is in general in the Castro prison-island. We have published several of his articles on ElCato.org.

Last Sunday, my friend was headed to a meeting of young dissidents when he was intercepted by government thugs. This is how Reporters Without Borders reported what happened next:

An attack by State Security agents on 5 April left Alvaro Yero Felipe, a young Havana-based dissident journalist, with a badly bruised face, a broken nose and a split lip. He was on his way with two friends to a meeting in support of prisoners of conscience when members of the political police intercepted him, took him to a nearby park and gave him a beating. “Yero’s experience is unfortunately representative of the mixture of harassment and brutality used by the authorities to crack down on dissent,” Reporters Without Borders said. “As the government has signed UN human rights conventions, it should logically punish officials who violate the international undertakings it has given.

This incident happened the same week that several U.S. Congressmen met with the Castro brothers in Havana and lavished praised on the eldest dictator, Fidel, to whom one of the congressmen described as the “ultimate survivor.” However, the ultimate survivors are the dissidents like my friend Álvaro Yero, who every day risk their life and limbs in pursuit of liberty. He’s my personal hero.

Tax Havens Should be Emulated, Not Prosecuted

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell

My March 23 Capitol Hill speech defending tax havens against fiscal protectionism is now a two-part Youtube series, complete with the powerpoint slides from my presentation. Unfortunately, we are fighting a defensive battle and the other side is making progress. If you have any suggestions for making stronger arguments for tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

“If I Had ONLY a Gun”

Posted by David Rittgers

ABC’s 20/20 did a hit piece on the Second Amendment and armed citizens on Friday night.  The show responded to the growing sentiment that “if I only had a gun,” maybe an armed citizen could make a difference in a spree shooting such as the incidents at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University.  In reality, it ought to be called “if I had ONLY a gun.”  Picking people without concealed carry permits to represent the armed citizen and rigging the scenario to ensure that they don’t defeat your narrative is propaganda, not journalism.

Several college students are selected to represent the “armed student” hypothetical, given some marksmanship training, and armed with training guns that shoot paint bullets. The firearms instructor who trained them plays spree shooter and storms the room.  All of the students are hit before they can effectively engage the mock spree shooter.

The show handicaps this scenario in favor of the attacker in several ways.  First, none of the students selected are actual concealed handgun permit holders who carry daily and practice regularly.  Those with more experience get it from shooting Airsoft guns or from a form of shooting that does not involve drawing from concealment.  The poor performance of the students in hitting the attacker is supposedly explained by the lack of law enforcement firearms training.

The simulation is too narrowly construed to show the full impact of an armed response.  First, the experiment is limited to one armed student in the first classroom that the spree shooter hits.  At Virginia Tech, the spree shooter entered several rooms, so a student in any room other than the first would be able to draw, find a position of cover and concealment, point the gun at the door, and wait for the assailant to enter.  Second, the experiment supposes that an intended victim pulling a gun and shooting back, even if not immediately effective, does nothing to stop the attack.

These results don’t reflect the reality of an armed citizen responding to a spree shooter.  Contrary to what the firearms instructor says, it is not “too much for a normal person” to deal with.  Often, the mere confrontation with an armed response takes them out of their revenge fantasy and derails the killing spree.

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Not Waiting for Government

Posted by David Boaz

As Tad DeHaven mentioned the other day, CNN reported recently that business owners and residents on Hawaii’s Kauai island got together and made repairs to a state park — in eight days — that the state had said would cost $4 million and might not get done for months. Businesses were losing money since people couldn’t visit the park, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.

“We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part,” [kayaking company owner Ivan] Slack said. “Just like everyone’s sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn’t wait anymore.”…

“We shouldn’t have to do this, but when it gets to a state level, it just gets so bureaucratic, something that took us eight days would have taken them years,” said Troy Martin of Martin Steel, who donated machinery and steel for the repairs. “So we got together — the community — and we got it done.”

It reminds me of the story 20 years ago of how Donald Trump got tired of watching the city of New York take six years to renovate a skating rink, so he just called up Mayor Ed Koch, offered to do it himself, and got the job done in less than four months. He got so enamored of the skating rink that he ended up getting the concession to run it.

And it also reminds me of the stories in James Tooley’s brand-new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, which talks about how poor people in China, India, and Africa have set up schools for their children because government schools were absent or of poor quality.

If government would get out of the way, businesses, churches, charities, and individuals would solve a lot more social problems.

Making Sure the Job Gets Done

Posted by Neal McCluskey

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last week or so, you’ll have noticed that the big story in education has been the highly suspicious handling of an evaluation of Washington, DC’s, voucher program by the supposedly politics-out-of-policymaking Obama administration.  The evaluation shows voucher students making clearly superior readings gains to students who applied for but did not receive vouchers, while math results were equal. In other words, vouchers seem to work. But it doesn’t matter: For all intents and purposes Congress killed DC choice last month, and throughout that murderous process this study was being held under wraps  – for numerous possible, but all unacceptable, reasons – in the United States Department of Education.

Well, on Saturday the Washington Post editorialized about the whole stinkin’ mess, and in so doing revealed something new: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan decided not to allow any new students to enroll in the program for the 2009-2010 school year, despite the program not being scheduled to end until 2010-2011. And, though it is close to unthinkable politically that both Congress and the DC City Council will reauthorize the program — just as Congressional enemies of educational freedom planned when they wrote those stipulations into law – it is not absolutely impossible. But in good hitman style, Duncan is making sure the job gets done, holding the pillow over the victim’s face as long and tightly as possible to make sure there won’t be any unforeseen and inconvenient coming back to life.

Oh, and irony of ironies? According to the Post, Duncan is doing this extra bit of dirty work because [italics added] “it is not in the best interest of students and their parents to enroll them in a program that may end a year from now.”

Piketty Tax Battle: Round Two

Posted by Chris Edwards

The Economist has posted rebuttals to first-round arguments in my tax debate with French economist Thomas Piketty. Piketty seems to think that everyone with a high income has a “grabbing hand” that comes at someone else’s expense.

The debate over tax rates on the rich is important, but Piketty is important in himself because he is widely cited in the media and elsewhere as if he were a neutral authority. For example, President Obama’s budget featured a chart showing that the top 1 percent of earners have greatly increased their share of national income over the decades, using Piketty’s numbers.

But Alan Reynolds has found serious flaws in Piketty’s calculations. Piketty bases his calculations on tax return data, but reported income under the federal income tax has changed greatly over time. 

The bottom line is to be suspicious when you see a chart on income trends that is sourced to this advocate of 80 percent tax rates.

Health Policy Death Match: Klein vs. Ponnuru

Posted by Michael F. Cannon

I count both Ramesh Ponnuru and Ezra Klein as friends.  (I’m so post-partisan.)  Why, oh why must they force me to choose between them??

Ponnuru had an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times where he reaffirmed his membership in the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.  Klein responded in a way that’s sure to satisfy his base, but I think he left the reality-based community wanting.  Are you ready for the fisk?

Klein suggests that if “80+ percent of Americans . . . think the system needs fundamental changes or a complete rebuild,” then 80+ percent of Americans must support universal coverage.  Hmmm, bit of a stretch.  In fact, I can recall one poll where nearly one-third of likely Democratic primary voters rejected universal coverage.

Klein suggests that giving consumers the freedom to avoid unwanted state health insurance regulations would mean that Arizonans wouldn’t get coverage for colorectal cancer screening, and that there would be no mammogram coverage in Idaho.  Mmm, that’s good crazy.  I refer my right honorable friend to the episode where The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn made a similar claim about mandates for prostate and cervical cancer screening.  I looked up the services covered by the plans made available to the Cohn family by the University of Michigan.  It turned out that six out of the seven available plans cover both prostate and cervical cancer screening — even though Michigan requires insurers to cover neither.  (I offered to wager Cohn a fancy dinner that his family has coverage for both, but I never heard back from him.  Foolish, really, to let me know where he gets his insurance. Klein would never give me such an opening . . . or would he?) What Ponnuru proposes is to let Arizonans and Idahoans and everyone else choose what their health plan covers.   Imagine that: people rationing medical care according to their preferences, rather than the preferences of employers, interest groups, bureaucrats, health policy wonks…  Why Klein clings to such regulations despite zero evidence that they actually increase access to the targeted services is beyond me.

Klein criticizes Ponnuru for proposing to replace the current tax preference for job-based coverage with a tax credit available to everyone, much like John McCain proposed during his (latest) presidential campaign.  Ponnuru cites a study estimating that tax credits would reduce the number of uninsured by 20 million.  Klein counter-cites one study estimating that tax credits would have zero net effect on the number of uninsured, and a second study estimating that those who transition from job-based coverage to the “individual” or “non-group” market would pay an additional $2,000 per year for an identical policy.   Klein’s criticisms sound persuasive — provided you know precious little about the topic.  For one thing, the two studies Klein cites are actually the same study.  Pity, really.  Had Klein found a second study to support his position, perhaps it would not have been quite so flawed as the one he did find.  Here’s what I wrote back in September about that study’s flaws:

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Who’s Blogging about Cato

Posted by Chris Moody

Are you blogging about Cato? Let us know. Send a link our way @catoinstitute or email cmoody@cato.org

Stop Spending Our Future

Posted by Tad DeHaven

That’s the title of an alarming, but informative, video over at Reason TV.  The video contains lots of eye-popping comparisons between amounts being spent on bailouts/”stimulus” and previous big-ticket government expenditures like the World War II and the New Deal.

And if you haven’t done so already, check out my colleague Dan Mitchell’s videos on the fallacies of Keynesian economics and the folly of so-called fiscal “stimulus” packages.

Seasteading and Other Technologies for Liberty

Posted by Timothy B. Lee

I’ve been following Patri Friedman’s work on seasteading for a number of years, so I was excited to see him contribute the lead essay in this month’s Cato Unbound. I think he makes some good points about the difficulty of achieving a free society through ordinary electoral politics. As he points out, libertarians are a minority of the electorate and the political game is stacked against politicians who aren’t willing to use their power to reward special interests. So smart libertarians should be looking at options outside of campaigns and elections to make the world a freer place.

But I think it’s a huge and unwarranted leap to go from this observation about the limits of electoral politics to claim that “the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time” and that “academic research has enlarged our understanding but they have gotten us no closer to an actual libertarian state.” It’s not difficult to find examples of academic research that changed the world. One of the most important trends toward liberty in the United States during the last century, the deregulation of transportation and communication markets in the 1970s, came about because a small group of academics persuaded Washington policymakers that deregulation would benefit consumers (and, in the process, their own political prospects). It surely mattered that Margaret Thatcher was a devotee of Friedrich Hayek. And if Friedman will forgive me for personalizing the debate a little bit, he must be familiar with the role his own grandfather had in ending the draft, achieving (relatively) stable money, and inspiring the modern school choice movement.

Now, Friedman says he’s interested in living in an “actual free society.” He probably regards the above examples as merely “small incremental gains in freedom.” But if that’s his critique, he bears the burden of showing that his preferred approach, seasteading, will itself achieve an “actual free society” rather then mere “incremental gains.” I’m not so sure.

Friedman makes much of the distinction between “technology” on the one hand and “advocacy” on the other. He thinks technological approaches are better because they provide superior leverage: a group as small as a few hundred people may be able to permanently lower the barrier to entry to statehood and fundamentally transform the nation-state game.

It’s an appealing vision, but I don’t think the distinction between technology and advocacy is so stark. As my colleague Will Wilkinson has pointed out, ideology is a kind of infrastructure. The tools of persuasion — magazine columns and television specials, for example — are means of improving this infrastructure by spreading new and better ideas. Modern communications technologies offer a kind of leverage not so dissimilar to the leverage Friedman hopes to achieve through seasteading. A small group of talented people can permanently change public attitudes, thereby shifting the Overton Window and changing the constraints politicians face.

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Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa

Posted by Chris Moody

Federal Study Supports School Vouchers

arne_duncanLast week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.

According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”

Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”

The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:

It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.

Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.

To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration

The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”

In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:

  • Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
  • Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
  • Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.

For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.

In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.

  • Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that exadead-aidmines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.
  • Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.
  • Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.

Find full-length videos to all Cato events on Cato’s events archive page.

Also, don’t miss Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast with legal policy analyst David Rittgers on Obama’s surge strategy in Afghanistan.