Archive for April, 2009
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here
- The new edition of Regulation examines the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the legal drinking age and climate change policies.
- In The Week, Will Wilkinson argues that the Obama administration should rethink its drug policy and that prominent marijuana users should “come out of the closet.”
- Gene Healy points out in the Washington Examiner why the Serve America Act (SAA) is no friend to freedom.
- The Cato Weekly Video features Rep. Paul Ryan discussing the Obama administration’s budget.
- In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Patri Friedman discusses seasteading and the prospects for liberty on the high seas.
The Bloom Could Not Survive
“Among several outstanding nominations made by President-elect Obama, I believe Arne Duncan is the best.”
That’s what Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said of now-U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at his confirmation hearing. Alexander thought that Duncan was a man who truly embraced reform and could work with anybody, and who, like his boss, seemed to really want to get beyond politics.
That was before reality set in.
With the Department of Education’s media-dodging, Friday-afternoon release of a study showing that Washington’s voucher program is outperforming DC public schools at a fraction of the cost, and Duncan’s galling failure to report these results as Congress debated the voucher program’s fate last month, it has become clear that Duncan is far from above playing politics. Of course, he isn’t necessarily calling the shots. He works for President Obama, whom you might recall announced that his children would attend posh, private, Sidwell Friends on a Friday afternoon.
It’s not only on choice that Obama and Duncan are playing the game. They are great at reform-y talk about such things as accountability and high standards, but talk is all they’ve delivered. Oh, that and tens-of-billions of dollars to bail out public schools from which parents should never be allowed to take their kids and money, and which aren’t good enough for the president’s children.
So is the public starting to see that the administration might not be delivering the great change it has promised? It’s hard to tell, but some journalists and education wonks are catching on.
Poor Choices Lead to Better Education
What would you do if you earned about a dollar a day and wanted a better life for your kids?
And what if your local public schools just weren’t working — with teachers often cutting classes or showing up only to sip tea and read the paper, ignoring their students. If you’re like the majority of poor Ghanians, Kenyans, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese that professor James Tooley has studied over the past decade, you’d pay for private schooling at tuition around $2/month.
From impoverished fishing villages to blighted ghettos like those featured in Slumdog Millionaire, from the largest shanty-town in Africa to the remote farming communities of inland China, the poorest people on Earth are not waiting for educational handouts. They are taking matters into their own hands and sending their children to private schools in their own neighborhoods and villages.
Next Wednesday at noon, James Tooley will be at Cato’s DC headquarters to launch his book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
His stories are compelling — his discovery of private schools serving slum children in Hyderabad, his thoughts while being interrogated by one of Mugabe’s goons in a basement cell in Zimbabwe, his reaction to the party functionary in Gansu, China who told him that the private schools he had just visited did not exist. In addition to James’ stories, you’ll also hear those of Reshma Lohia, who runs Lohia’s Little Angels — a school serving 500 poor children in Hyderabad, India.
When I report my findings that parent-driven education markets outperform state-run school monopolies, one of the most common objections I hear is that many parents — especially poor, marginally-educated ones — couldn’t make wise choices for their kids. If you’ve ever pondered that concern, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Cato Institute next Wednesday at noon. Because James has not only chronicled the existence of private schools serving vast numbers of the poor, he has documented in peer-reviewed studies how their performance compares to that of nearby public schools spending many times as much per pupil.
You can register for the event here and help spread the word on Facebook. We look forward to seeing you.
Majorities Favor Soaking the Rich
We are in the middle of a nine-day debate at The Economist on the proposition that “the rich should pay higher taxes.” I’m on the “no” side of the proposition. French economist Thomas Piketty is on the “yes” side, arguing that we ought to impose an 80 percent tax on those with the highest incomes.
I need help! Thus far, readers are favoring Piketty 57 percent to 43 percent. Please go to the site and register your vote.
Are website visitors actually reading the statements, or do their votes just reflect their existing political biases? Are they mainly Europeans or Americans? We don’t know, but majorities in favor of 80 percent tax rates does not bode well for economic freedom.
On Friday, Piketty and I post our rebuttals to opening statements, and next week we make closing arguments.
Getting the Opponent to React in Foolish and Self-Defeating Ways Is One of the Primary Goals of Most Terror Campaigns
Stephen Walt has a great blog post up at ForeignPolicy.com.
I particularly appreciate how he recognizes that terrorists seek and profit from overreaction on the part of the victim state:
If our leaders react to every terrorist incident as if it’s a monumental disaster, and if they hype the terrorist threat for political advantage — as George Bush and Dick Cheney did — the public will surely respond by demanding that we throw more resources at the problem than is prudent. Getting the opponent to react in foolish and self-defeating ways is one of the primary goals of most terror campaigns, of course, because these blunders can help the terrorists win victories that they could not achieve otherwise. We did more damage to ourselves when we invaded Iraq than Osama bin Laden accomplished on 9/11, and an open-ended commitment in Central Asia could easily compound that error.
You don’t have to believe that the Bush Administration wrongly sought political advantage – they may have believed the hype or believed that hyping threats was good policy – to recognize that hyping terror threats advances terrorists’ goals and damages our own interests.
Will the Military Industrial Complex Save American Foreign Policy?
Missing from most of the commentary on the Secretary of Defense’s big defense spending speech yesterday is the fact that the program cuts he proposed are largely a result of freezing the topline — keeping defense spending level (once you adjust for inflation) for the next decade.
For nearly a decade the country has really had two defense budgets – one for imagined conventional wars against states like China, another from nation-building, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. The first budget requires a small ground force and lots of big platforms operated by the Air Force and Navy. The latter requires much larger ground forces, a few niche capabilities like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, and less high technology wonders.
The current American love affair with counterinsurgency has resulted in a gradual shift of dollars from the conventional budget to the unconventional one. We are reversing the old idea that the American way of war is to replace labor with capital, or manpower with technology. We are becoming a land power first. We have been increasing manpower in the Army and Marines — adding 90,000 new troops — and paying them way more (compensation per service member is up by almost half since 1998). Personnel costs are taking more of the budget. And for more complex reasons, including health care costs, the operations and maintenance part of the budget – essentially the day to day cost of running the military — has also been growing fast when measured per service member. (For details on these issues, read this testimony by Stephen Daggett of the Congressional Research Service.)
That was bound to squeeze the other big parts of the defense budget — research, development and procurement of new weapons systems. There is too much future cost in the budget for everything to fit without topline growth, so something had to give. Big weapons programs are where the most give is, if you don’t want to cut manpower.
That conflict was delayed while the budget topline grew, but now that it is flat, it erupts. The manpower intensive military that follows from our current policies is eating into the conventional military that delivers manufactoring jobs across the country and the high-technology dreams of our military leaders.
What will be interesting to see is whether this shift encourages those leaders and their friends on the Hill to take up the arguments that people like me have been making for years: that small wars are mostly dumb wars. Preparation for these wars didn’t much hurt the military industrial complex before, now it does.
An additional note: Gates’ criticism of the acquisition process was on the mark. Rather than blaming out of control weapons costs on the kind of contracts we write or crafty contractors, as the President seems to, Gates noted correctly that the trouble is the requirements process — what we want, not how we buy it.
New at Cato (4/7/09)
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a comprehensive daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here
- Focusing on “Lessons from the Financial Crisis” the newest edition of Cato Journal is now available.
- In The Wall Street Journal, Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith discuss why asset bubbles form in markets, and how they can lead to a Depression.
- Ted Galen Carpenter comments on last weekend’s NATO agreement on what strategy to pursue with Afghanistan in National Interest.
- Writing in The Washington Times, Nat Hentoff weighs in on the human rights atrocities that continue in Darfur.
- In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Glenn Greenwald discusses his new Cato report on the successful drug decriminalization in Portugal.
A (Baby) Step in the Right Direction on Gambling
Semi-good news for lovers of civil liberties and the rule of law. PartyGaming, a UK -based internet gambling company, has reached a deal with the Department of Justice. In exchange for a $105m “fee”, prosecution proceedings against PartyGaming will be dropped.
Why am I only partially excited by this development? Although I think that dropping the case is a positive move, PartyGaming withdrew from the U.S. market when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed, so the case against the company (and therefore its punishment) is, in this non-lawyers opinion at least, dubious. The Wall Street Journal alludes to the retroactive nature of the DoJs case here:
After almost two years of discussions, the U.S. Attorney’s Officer for the Southern District of New York has agreed not to prosecute PartyGaming or any of its subsidiaries for providing internet gambling services to customers in the U.S. prior to the U.S. government banning the online gambling industry in October, 2006.” [italics mine]
Aside from their assault on civil liberties, U.S. laws on internet gambling go against the spirit and the letter of WTO law, and undermine the international trading system that has on balance served the United States well (see more here and an FT piece on the announcement here).
Who’s Blogging about Cato
On April 3, Cato hosted a special blogger briefing with Glenn Greenwald, who was here to speak about his new paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.
Here are a few highlights from bloggers who wrote about it:
- Dan Bernath from the Marijuana Policy Project
- Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org
- Jesse Singal, associate editor of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress
Also, a few links to bloggers who are writing about Cato:
- Citing new research that shows that the DC school choice pilot program was highly successful, Betsy Newmark linked to Andrew J. Coulson’s commentary on the study results.
- Ilya Somin discussed Patri Friedman’s new essay at Cato Unbound about the Seasteading Institute and the history of libertarian activism.
- Blogger Connie Carr wrote about William Niskanen’s essay in the new Cato Policy Report, “How to turn a Recession into a Depression.”
If you are blogging about Cato, let us know by emailing cmoody@cato.org or catch us on Twitter @catoinstitute.
National Defense, Keynesianism, or Just Pure Rent-Seeking?
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) is fighting hard to maintain production of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, which happens to be made by Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Ga. But Isakson insists that he’s not fighting for the plane just because it’s made in Georgia. No, he tells NPR, it’s important to recognize that it’s actually made by 90,000 workers in 49 states, and you don’t want to lose those jobs at a time of high unemployment.
In a letter to President Obama, he spelled out his argument, albeit with slightly different numbers:
Over 25,000 Americans work for the 1,000+ suppliers in 44 states that manufacture the F-22. Moreover, it is estimated that another 70,000 additional Americans indirectly owe their jobs to this program. As we face one of the most trying economic times in recent history it is critical to preserve existing high paying, specialized jobs that are critical to our nation’s defense.
To be sure, Isakson does insist that the plane is vital to national security, an argument that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Cato’s Chris Preble challenge. But it doesn’t say much for Republican arguments against President Obama’s wasteful spending when Republican senators argue that we should build a hugely expensive airplane as a jobs program.
Obama Fires Izzo, Awards Michigan State 18 Points
Okay, I made that up. But suppose President Obama had reversed the outcome of the NCAA men’s basketball championship. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the tournament, wouldn’t it?
New at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound continues our tradition of stirring up controversy. The lead essay is by Patri Friedman, who challenges the advocates of liberty as follows:
I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. For many years, I enthusiastically advocated for liberty under the vague assumption that advocacy would help our cause. However, I recently began trying to create free societies as my full-time job, and this has given me a dramatic perspective shift from my days of armchair philosophizing. My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time.
Argument has refined our principles, and academic research has enlarged our understanding, but they have gotten us no closer to an actual libertarian state. Our debating springs not from calculated strategy, but from an intuitive “folk activism”: an instinct to seek political change through personal interaction, born in our hunter-gatherer days when all politics was personal. In the modern world, however, bad policies are the result of human action, not human design. To change them we must understand how they emerge from human interaction, and then alter the web of incentives that drives behavior. Attempts to directly influence people or ideas without changing incentives, such as the U.S. Libertarian Party, the Ron Paul campaign, and academic research, are thus useless for achieving real-world liberty.
Cato isn’t called out by name, but it easily could have been. Like I said, Cato Unbound tries to be controversial.
What’s needed, Friedman claims, is not more study or advocacy, but a change in the deeper institutional structures that give rise to government policies. Competition among states (and non-state agents!), new technologies, and new intentional communities may just induce old-fashioned governments to behave a whole lot better. By contrast, just recommending somewhat better policies won’t do very much, not if all we do is write about them. (Friedman seems particularly skeptical about blogs. Ahem.)
Is this just a young person’s impatience? Or has Friedman found a serious weakness in libertarian activism? One reply I might make is that Cato scholars have researched quite a few topics that Friedman would probably find worthwhile. It’s important to document these things, and much of this work directly furthers the kind of structural reform that Friedman favors.
Consider the many Cato scholars who have heralded the rise of tax competition — in which states feel increasing pressure to deliver a low-cost product when their taxpayers can move elsewhere. Or consider Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book whose conclusions inform Friedman’s own project. This book began with a series of discussions among public policy scholars (on a blog no less!). Cato actively promoted Caplan’s work, and we would hope that Friedman would find this an effort well-spent. An upcoming event with author James Tooley shows how the world’s poor are founding their own schools to educate themselves, admirably free from any state interference — a new, private social practice bests an incompetent government! These things matter, I’d say, and they matter even if we accept Friedman’s premises. (We’re also giving a platform to Friedman, both here and at an event on April 7.)
In any case, this a big and very important discussion for the libertarian movement, of which the Cato Institute is only a part. Cato Unbound will have a remarkable series of panelists commenting throughout this week and next, including Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and noted philanthropist; and Brian Doherty, who has researched and written about more forms of libertarian activism than most of us can even recall. Whatever side of the debate you end up taking, be sure to stop by to catch this month’s edition of Cato Unbound.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
