Archive for May, 2009
Name That Company: Fiasco
NPR asks listeners what the new company created by President Obama out of the remains of the Chrysler corporation, to be controlled by the United Auto Workers, funded by the American taxpayers, and managed by Fiat, should be called.
One listener suggested AutomObama, with the slogan ”You’ll Be Paying on It for Years.” Another offered “FIAT: Fix It Again, Barack.”
Of course, the name Fiat works pretty well for this new company. After all, “fiat” means, according to Webster’s, ” a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort” or ”an authoritative or arbitrary order.” (And note that when you look up “fiat” in Webster’s, you get an ad for the new company.)
But it’s hard to beat the name suggested by most listeners: Fiasco.
Pakistan’s Critical Hour
I’m sympathetic to Ahmed Rashid’s arguments expressed in today’s Washington Post. The Pakistani journalist argues that President Obama’s plan to dedicate $1.5 billion annually to Pakistan in non-military spending “will also affect America’s image in Pakistan and the region.” However, I’m having trouble with his previous point: “The speed and conditions with which Congress provides emergency aid to Islamabad will affect the Pakistani government and army’s ability and will to resist the Taliban onslaught.”
For many years, the U.S. government has shoveled billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan (almost $20 billion since 9/11). Certainly in the tribal areas, non-military aid directed to education and comprehensive study programs can help to mitigate the spread of militancy among younger generations. But a coherent distribution mechanism must be in place or else no one in Pakistan will benefit. Given the problems of corruption and mismanagement afflicting the distribution of military aid, why should we expect the distribution of non-military aid to be more effective? Besides, there is very little Washington can do to “affect” Pakistan’s “will” to resist the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid, General Petraeus, and many others are correct to conclude that to be truly effective at combating internal insurgencies, Pakistan must re-orient its military away from conventional threats-such as India-and toward the low-intensity guerilla insurgency the army is presently ill-equipped and poorly trained to fight. But before Pakistan gains the capability to attack insurgents they must first find the willingness to do so.
With regards to the general alarm about militant incursions into valleys outside of Swat, this is certainly warranted. Militants have burned down or blown up over 200 schools, beheaded opponents, and forces tens of thousands to flee. But like I mentioned to my good friend and colleague, Ed Crane, the Taliban have no F-16s, no tanks and no means of taking over a country of 172 million people. India was certainly instrumental in the break up of Pakistan in 1971. But even India failed to conquer a large part of West Pakistan or takeover the country entirely. Granted, these militants are scary folks, but we need a bit of nuance on the whole “Pakistan is imploding” meme coursing through the Beltway. As I elaborate here, “Balkanization” of Pakistan, which I foresee as a distinct possibility, is much different then seeing the complete collapse of civilian and tribal administration.
Also, if America is worried about Pakistan’s imminent demise, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must understand that the coalition’s presence in Afghanistan threatens to further destabilize Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis are not radical. But the spread of tribal militias in the northwest, tens of thousands of refugees (and certainly some militants) fleeing into major cities from aerial drone strikes, and widespread distrust of America’s intentions in the region, all place undue stress on a nation already divided, weak and fragile. As I argue in my recent policy analysis:
President Obama remains unequivocal in his commitment to continue airstrikes. But he and his policy planners must recognize that continuing airstrikes will undermine the authority of President Zardari, as well as Obama’s ability to coordinate policies effectively with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders. The president’s national security team must understand that the struggle against extremism would best be waged by bolstering Islamabad’s ability to compete with militants for political authority in FATA. If his administration simply increases attacks from pilotless drones, it will only push more wavering tribes further into the Taliban camp, continue his predecessor’s policy of dictation, rather than cooperation, and undermine the perception within the Pakistani body politic that Obama can change U.S. policy toward the Muslim world.
Aside from ceasing aerial drone strikes, another way to help America’s image is in the region is for prominent U.S. decision-makers to stop publicly speculating about the fate of their democracy, as Petraeus did last week. America has a history of sponsoring insurgents, financing coups, and funding internal dissidents against democratically-elected leaders. Regardless of intent, Washington is perceived as being blatantly manipulative and endorsing a military takeover when we make reckless statements like this.
Checker Finn Is 99.44 Percent Right
Fordham Foundation president Checker Finn notes today that recent upticks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress cannot be reasonably credited to the No Child Left Behind act (hat tip to Bill Evers). The NCLB, President Bush’s signature education initiative, was supposed to improve student achievement through bureaucratic accountability measures.
But after noting that NCLB’s proponents can’t back up their claims that the law is working, Finn suggests that we need an “education-achievement ‘audit agency’ to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance.”
Maybe. But Amazon.com didn’t have to be told by a federal product quality audit czar to allow its customers to rate the products it sells. They’ve done it because it’s good business. In fact, no matter what product or service you’re interested in, there are resources on the Web to find out virtually anything you could possibly want to know about it. Reviews by users, professional reviews, criticism from competitors…. As a result, consumers are better informed than ever before. Except in education, which operates outside the free enterprise system.
Sure, we could add a bureaucratic audit agency and hope that it will make our bureaucratic education accountability law accountable, and that that, in turn, will make our bureaucratic education system efficient and innovative.
Or we could just do what we know already works in every other sector of the economy: let consumers choose, and make it easy for a diversity of public and private schools compete to serve them.
Libertarian Wisdom
From Will Saletan at Slate:
the tricky thing about official intervention is that once the state gets its foot in the door, you don’t necessarily get to dictate what it can and can’t do.
He’s talking about how “For the usual incoherent combination of lefty reasons—not enough private discrimination in working conditions, too much private discrimination in family values–” he ”felt the urge to support regulation of the [surrogate motherhood] industry,” but then he read about Chinese police kicking in doors and forcing surrogate mothers to abort their babies, and realized that wasn’t “the kind of policing liberals have in mind when they call for tighter regulation of the fertility industry.”
But the lesson is broader, of course. It applies to health care, education, energy, faith-based organizations, and just about any enterprise you let the state take a role in.
New At Cato
For more commentary, visit Cato’s op-ed archive.
- Appearing on Fox News, foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent discusses the recent violence in Pakistan.
- In the American Spectator, Doug Bandow questions the reasons why the U.S. is still a member of NATO.
- Randal O’Toole argues that high-speed rail is not the solution to efficiency and environmental problems in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
- In The Washington Times, Nat Hentoff argues that officials who sanctioned and participated in torture should not be allowed to use the “just following orders” excuse.
- In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Mark Calabria discusses the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Reason TV on Obama & DC School Vouchers
Reason’s Nick Gillespie has a great new video in which anguished parents and students ask president Barack Obama why he’s letting the DC school voucher program die.
Bank ‘Stress Tests’ Need Transparency
As the bank stress tests are released, it is vital that the public receive specific and detailed information on each financial institution. The Administration’s and the Federal Reserve’s continued policy of attempting to disguise the differing health of each bank has been a failure. What is best for the taxpayer and the investing public is sufficient information to separate the good banks from the bad.
For those institutions which lack sufficient capital to remain solvent, they should seek private capital or else be closed and resolved. Too many taxpayer dollars have already been wasted keeping alive failed institutions. The Administration’s policy of keeping failed institutions on taxpayer-financed life-support only serves to retard the market’s ability to move assets away from those who do not, or cannot, make productive use of them toward those who can. It is time to remember that the unparalleled wealth-creating engine of the market depends as much on allowing failure as it does in encouraging success.
Banks passing the stress tests should be allowed and encouraged to re-pay their TARP funds as soon as possible, and with no additional strings attached. More importantly, the Administration should use any returned TARP funds to pay-down the increasing government debt, rather than be diverted to bailing-out other failed companies.
Torture? No.
Charles Krauthammer’s recent column tells us that the wisdom of torture is undeniable. According to Krauthammer, there are two situations where torture is justified: the ticking time bomb scenario and when we capture high-ranking terrorists and conclude that giving them the third degree may save lives. Furthermore, it would be “imprudent” for anyone who would not use torture to be named the commander of Central Command (CENTCOM), the military organization in charge of American forces in the Middle East.
The generals who have been in charge of CENTCOM and other national security officials disagree.
Here is a video of General Petraeus, current commander of Central Command, saying that American forces cannot resort to torturing prisoners:
The open letter Petraeus mentions in the video is available here. He admonishes our troops to treat prisoners humanely. “Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemies.”
Former CENTCOM commanders Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar don’t endorse torture either, evidenced by their open letter (along with dozens of other former general officers) to Congress asking that the CIA abide by the Army interrogation manual.
Hoar and former Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak wrote separately to denounce torture:
As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb.
So, once we sign off on the ticking time bomb scenario, the rationalization spreads to whenever we think it may save lives. Sound familiar?
These former commanders are not alone. Colonel Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, also had some words on the subject. “We can never retake the moral high ground when we claim the right to do unto others that which we would vehemently condemn if done to us.”
Malcolm Nance, former head of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course (where sailors are trained in resisting interrogation techniques, including waterboarding), seems to know a thing or two about the topic. “I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.” He roundly denounces the use of waterboarding as wrong, ineffective, and counterproductive. Just for the record, water actually enters the lungs of a waterboarding victim. This is not simulated drowning, but controlled drowning. Read the whole thing.
Krauthammer’s column gives the impression that all national security experts support making torture our national policy. Wrong.
Free Speech v. The Federal Election Commission
The so-called Citizens United case offers the Supreme Court a chance to severely curtail the free speech abuses of the Federal Election Commission. John Samples, Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Steve Simpson and George Mason University law professor Allison Hayward weigh in. You can subscribe to Cato’s YouTube videos here and our Weekly Video podcast here.
Jim DeMint’s Freedom Tent
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has been a leader in the fight for fiscal responsibility in Congress. He’s even led on issues that many elected officials have shied away from, such as Social Security reform and free trade. Recently he said that he would support Pat Toomey over Arlen Specter in a Republican primary, which may have prompted Specter’s party switch. DeMint was widely quoted as saying, “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.”
It may have been feedback from that comment that caused DeMint to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on his vision of a “Big Tent” Republican party. He makes some excellent points:
But big tents need strong poles, and the strongest pole of our party — the organizing principle and the crucial alternative to the Democrats — must be freedom. The federal government is too big, takes too much of our money, and makes too many of our decisions….
We can argue about how to rein in the federal Leviathan; but we should agree that centralized government infringes on individual liberty and that problems are best solved by the people or the government closest to them.
Moderate and liberal Republicans who think a South Carolina conservative like me has too much influence are right! I don’t want to make decisions for them. That’s why I’m working to reduce Washington’s grip on our lives and devolve power to the states, communities and individuals, so that Northeastern Republicans, Western Republicans, Southern Republicans, and Midwestern Republicans can define their own brands of Republicanism. It’s the Democrats who want to impose a rigid, uniform agenda on all Americans. Freedom Republicanism is about choice — in education, health care, energy and more. It’s OK if those choices look different in South Carolina, Maine and California.
That’s a good federalist, or libertarian, or traditional American conservative vision. But is it really Jim DeMint’s vision?
DeMint says “that centralized government infringes on individual liberty and that problems are best solved by the people or the government closest to them.” And he says it’s OK if “choices look different in South Carolina, Maine and California.” But marriage is traditionally a matter for the states to decide. Some states allow first cousins to marry, others don’t. Some states recognized interracial marriage in the early 20th century, others didn’t. And in every case the federal government accepted each state’s rules; if you had a marriage license from one of the states, the federal government considered you married. But Senator DeMint has twice voted for a constitutional amendment to overrule the states’ power to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In his op-ed, he writes, “Republicans can welcome a vigorous debate about legalized abortion or same-sex marriage; but we should be able to agree that social policies should be set through a democratic process, not by unelected judges.” That’s a reasonable argument, but the amendment that DeMint voted for would overturn state legislative decisions as well as judicial decisions.
Does Jim DeMint believe that “it’s OK if choices [about marriage] look different in South Carolina, Maine, [Vermont, New Hampshire], and California”? If so, he should renounce his support for the anti-federalist federal marriage amendment. If not, then it seems that he opposes the Democrats’ attempts to “impose a rigid, uniform agenda on all Americans . . . in education, health care, energy and more,” but he has no problem with Republicans imposing their own “rigid, uniform agenda on all Americans” from South Carolina to Vermont.
It might be noted that Senator DeMint also supported the federal attempt to overturn Florida court decisions regarding Terri Schiavo, but we can hope all Republicans have learned their lesson on that bit of mass hysteria.
New at Cato Unbound: Ten Years of Code
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig’s seminal work on Internet law, turns ten this year. To mark the occasion, Cato Unbound has invited a distinguished panel of Internet law experts to discuss the book’s enduring significance: What did it get right? What did it get wrong? And where do we go from here?
Joining us will be Adam Thierer, Jonathan Zittrain, and Lawrence Lessig himself. The lead essay, up this morning, is by Declan McCullagh. Readers of Code will recall that McCullagh was called out by name in the book’s final chapter, and his “do-nothing” cyberlibertarian views were criticized at length. Ten years later, is it time to reconsider? Join us and find out.
Obama Taking on ‘Tax Havens’
Jeff Zeleny at the New York Times Caucus Blog reports, “President Obama will present a set of proposals on Monday aimed at changing international tax policy, calling for the elimination of benefits for companies and wealthy individuals that harbor their cash in offshore accounts.”
Cato scholars have long made arguments in defense of tax havens. In The Wall Street Journal, Senior Fellow Richard Rahn outlined the policy the federal government should be taking instead:
The correct policy for the United States to follow is to reduce its corporate tax rate to make it internationally competitive, and to move toward a tax system that does not punish savings and productive investment so severely. We know from the experiences of many countries that reducing tax rates and simplifying the tax code improve both tax compliance and economic growth. Tax protectionism should be rejected because it is at least as destructive to economic growth and job creation as are tariffs on goods and services.
Cato scholar Daniel J. Mitchell narrated a three part video series on the subject, presenting the economic and moral cases for tax havens, and a final video that punctured myths associated with the practice.
Mitchell spoke on Capitol Hill last month about the role of tax havens and in Foreign Policy magazine, Mitchell explained why tax havens are a blessing.
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