Archive for October, 2009
Can’t Achieve Public Option Without Deception
Speaker Pelosi is set to unveil a health care bill today including yet another version of the so-called public option. This one would let providers “negotiate” reimbursement rates with the government-run program.
That’s the health care equivalent of negotiating with Tony Soprano.
But regardless of how much lipstick they put on this pig, it still is a government takeover of the health care system that would all but eliminate private insurance and force millions of Americans into a government-run system. Apparently the House leadership has decided that if at first you can’t get the votes by being honest about your true intentions, lie, lie, again.
Siding with the Geeks on Network Neutrality
One of the perennial tropes of the network neutrality debate has been the tendency of the pro-regulation side to paint it as a David-and-Goliath struggle between big, evil corporations and the little guy. Way back in 2006, James Gattuso pointed out how silly this is: in fact, the push for network neutrality is backed by some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley. Julian points out a particularly lazy example of this kind of ad hominem that happens to target Cato: It seems that we’re one of the “15 greatest enemies of net neutrality.” And that along with CEI, Cato “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.”
As Julian points out, if “VoIP News” had done its homework, it might have discovered that Cato makes its annual report freely available online. Then they they would have noticed that corporate support accounts for about 1 percent of Cato’s budget, and that none of Cato’s corporate funders are major opponents of network neutrality regulation.
Shoddy reporting aside, the “VoIP News” article does actually highlight an important point: the people who built the Internet are deeply split on the issue of regulating the Internet, with eminent computer scientists including Bob Kahn (co-inventor of the Internet’s TCP/IP protocols with Vint Cerf) and Dave Farber (another networking pioneer) on the anti-regulation side. And based on conversations I’ve had here at Princeton, Kahn and Farber are far from the only computer scientists who are skeptical that the FCC is up to the job of regulating the Internet.
In a vacuous appearance on Rachel Maddow last week, blogger Xeni Jardin cited Vint Cerf’s support of regulation and urged viewers to “side with the geeks who actually built the Internet.” She did not, of course, mention that Kahn and Farber, who fit that description as well as Cerf does, are on the other side. “The geeks” are as split on this issue as everyone else.
Update: Tim Carney has an excellent article making a similar point: Internet companies like Google and Amazon, who have lobbied hard for network neutrality, gave overwhelmingly to Obama over McCain in the 2008 election. This doesn’t prove Obama and Chairman Genachowski are insincere in their support for network neutrality. But it does mean we should take both side’s arguments with a grain of salt.
Startling Incompetence at ANSI Standards Group
I have always regarded standard-setting organizations as serious players who take care to keep slightly boring the work of establishing uniformity in products and protocols. But a press release from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) may cause me to reassess.
“IDSP Issues Report Calling for National Identity Verification Standard” is the release, and it’s bristling with error and malformed policy assertions. IDSP is the “Identity Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel,” an ANSI subgroup.
Take this doozy:
[T]he Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the REAL ID Act of 2005 require verification of identity prior to the issuance of birth certificates and driver’s licenses / ID cards, respectively. However, the IRTPA regulations have not yet been released even in draft form and the REAL ID regulations do not provide practical guidance on how to corroborate a claim of identity under different circumstances.
Folks, REAL ID repealed the identity security provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. (It’s a good bet that regulations for a repealed law aren’t going to move out of draft form for a very long time, eh?) And REAL ID does not require verification of identity prior to issuance of birth certificates. What could that even mean?! “Hey you—little baby—let me see some ID before I issue you your birth certificate.”
The release repeats the tired mantra that 9/11 terrorists got U.S. identity documents—”some by fraud.” The 9/11 Commission dedicated three-quarters of a page to its identity recommendations—out of 400 substantive pages—and neither the commission nor anyone since has shown how denying people U.S. identity documents would prevent terrorism.
Are there needs for identity standards? Of course. And there are a lot of projects in a lot of places working on that. If an organization doesn’t know the law, and doesn’t know how the subject matter it’s dealing with functions in society, I don’t know how it could possibly be relied on to set appropriate standards.
ANSI should take a look at this subgroup and see if its work is actually competent. Judging by this press release, it’s not.
Some Thoughts on the New Surveillance
Last night I spoke at “The Little Idea,” a mini-lecture series launched in New York by Ari Melber of The Nation and now starting up here in D.C., on the incredibly civilized premise that, instead of some interminable panel that culminates in a series of audience monologues-disguised-as-questions, it’s much more appealing to have a speaker give a ten-minute spiel, sort of as a prompt for discussion, and then chat with the crowd over drinks.
I’d sketched out a rather longer version of my remarks in advance just to make sure I had my main ideas clear, and so I’ll post them here, as a sort of preview of a rather longer and more formal paper on 21st century surveillance and privacy that I’m working on. Since ten-minute talks don’t accommodate footnotes very well, I should note that I’m drawing for a lot of these ideas on the excellent work of legal scholars Lawrence Lessig and Daniel Solove (relevant papers at the links). Anyway, the expanded version of my talk after the jump:
Wednesday Links
- How Washington’s plans may result in even higher executive pay.
“In 1993, Congress intervened in corporate compensation and messed things up. Now it’s the White House’s turn.”
- The case for allowing insider trading: “Want to keep companies honest, make the markets work more efficiently and encourage investors to diversify? Let insiders buy and sell.”
- Cato v. Heritage on the Patriot Act, Round III: “In hindsight, did Congress and the president react too hastily in 2001 by passing the Patriot Act just weeks after the 9/11 attacks?”
- Instead of fixing the Patriot Act, President Obama is protecting it.
- Twenty years later: Why the Berlin Wall fell.
- Podcast: “Financial Privacy and Freedom” featuring Prince Michael of Liechtenstein.
Federal Education Results Prove the Framers Right
Yesterday, I offered the Fordham Foundation’s Andy Smarick an answer to a burning question: What is the proper federal role in education? It was a question prompted by repeatedly mixed signals coming from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about whether Washington will be a tough guy, coddler, or something in between when it comes to dealing with states and school districts. And what was my answer? The proper federal role is no role, because the Constitution gives the feds no authority over American education.
Not surprisingly, Smarick isn’t going for that. Unfortunately, his reasoning confirms my suspicions: Rather than offering a defense based even slightly on what the Constitution says, Smarick essentially asserts that the supreme law of the land is irrelevant because it would lead to tough reforms and, I infer, the elimination of some federal efforts he might like.
While acknowledging that mine is a ”defensible argument,” Smarick writes that he disagrees with it because it “would presumably require immediately getting rid of IDEA, Title I, IES, NAEP, and much more.” He goes on to assert that I might ”argue that doing so is necessary and proper because it’s the only path that squares with our founding document, but policy-wise it is certainly implausible any time soon.” Not far after that, Smarick pushes my argument aside and addresses a question to ”those who believe that it’s within the federal government’s authority to do something in the realm of schools.”
OK. Let’s play on Smarick’s grounds. Let’s ignore what the Constitution says and see what, realistically, we could expect to do about federal intervention in education, as well as what we can realistically expect from continued federal involvement.
First off, I fully admit that getting Washington back within constitutional bounds will be tough. That said, I mapped out a path for doing so in the last chapter of Feds In The Classroom, a path that doesn’t, unlike what Smarick suggests, require immediate cessation of all federal education activities. Washington obviously couldn’t be pulled completely out of the schools overnight.
Perhaps more to Smarick’s point, cutting the feds back down to size has hardly been a legislatively dead issue. Indeed, as recently as 2007 two pieces of legislation that would have considerably withdrawn federal tentacles from education — the A-PLUS and LEARN acts – were introduced in Congress. They weren’t enacted, but they show that getting the feds out of education is hardly a pipe dream. And with tea parties, the summer of townhall discontent, and other recent signs of revolt against big government, it’s hardly out of the question that people will eventually demand that the feds get out of their schools.
Of course, there is the other side of the realism argument: How realistic is it to think that the federal government can be made into a force for good in education? It certainly hasn’t been one so far. Just look at the following chart plotting federal education spending against achievement, a chart that should be very familiar by now.
Are Savvier Democrats Playing Rope-a-Dope?
Let’s simplify things and say there are essentially two parts to the health care bills moving through Congress: an individual mandate that would effectively nationalize health care, and a government-run program that would explicitly nationalize it slowly, over time.
One explanation for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) including the government-run program — supporters call it a “public option”; I prefer Fannie Med — in the Senate bill is that Fannie Med’s popularity is on the rise. Another explanation is that Reid had to include it to remain majority leader and get left-wing Nevadans to work for his re-election.
But a third explanation, not inconsistent with the others, is that the savvier Democrats know that all they need to nationalize health care is an individual mandate. So they’ll let Fannie Med take a beating, and then pass the more sweeping individual mandate when opponents are too exhausted and distracted by their “victory” over Fannie Med to notice.
(Cross-posted at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)
This Week in History: Reagan Backs Goldwater
Forty-five years ago yesterday, the actor Ronald Reagan gave a nationally televised speech on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater. It came to be known to Reagan fans as “The Speech” and launched his own, more successful political career.
And a very libertarian speech it was:
This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”
The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.
Video versions of the speech here. Would that the current assault on economic freedom would turn up another presidential candidate with Reagan’s values and talents.
Studying Confirmation Bias Tends to Convince People of the Existence of Confirmation Bias
If you were a federal contractor with millions of dollars in federal business, would you ever say that federal regulations are too burdensome? Would you tell a newspaper that you violated federal rules by turning away workers because a federal database reported a discrepancy between the information you submitted and the information the government holds?
I don’t think so.
But on National Review‘s “The Corner” blog, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies takes a federal contractor’s self-serving statements about E-Verify as evidence that it’s “working fine.”
Of course it is! If you carefully consider the evidence you want to!
Your Tax Dollars at Work
The National Park Service announced Friday that it has removed its superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park and reassigned him to work in a cultural resources office as an assistant to the associate director. His job duties have not yet been determined.
John A. Latschar said Thursday that his demotion was in response to the public disclosure of Internet activity in which he viewed more than 3,400 “sexually-explicit” images over a two-year period on his government computer — a violation of department policy. The misconduct, which Latschar acknowledged in a sworn statement, was found during a year-long investigation by the Interior Department’s inspector general and was documented in an internal Aug. 7 report obtained by The Washington Post.
The reassignment came after a Post report Monday about the results of the investigator’s forensic analysis of Latschar’s computer hard drive, which showed “significant inappropriate user activity” and numbered the “most sexually-explicit” images at 3,456….
David Barna, spokesman for the National Park Service, said Latschar’s annual salary of $145,000 and his pension will not be affected. The cultural resources office is based in Washington, but Latschar will commute from his home in Gettysburg to a Park Service office about 30 miles away in Frederick, Barna said.
Hey, can I get that deal? If I download 3,500 pornographic images on my office computer, can I get reassigned to a telecommuting job with no defined duties at my current salary and pension? As superintendent of a very visible national park, Latschar had a job with a lot of pressure, lots of criticism, management challenges, etc. Now he’s going to be some sort of undefined “assistant to an associate director in a cultural resources office,” but he won’t have to actually go to the cultural resources office, and he’ll still get the same pay and benefits he was getting for doing a real, stressful job. Does anyone in the federal government ever get fired?
How Did the FCC Come to Acquire This Power?
Jeff Eisenach and Adam Thierer have a great essay in The American honoring the 50th anniversary of Ronald Coase’s article “The Federal Communications Commission.” It’s timely given the FCC’s proposal to establish public utility-style regulation of the Internet under the banner “net neutrality,” and it’s a good general warning to Neo-Progressives who “see market failure as the source of most problems, and government as the centerpiece of most solutions.”
The Church of Global Warming
Novelist Michael Crichton said that environmentalism had all the trappings of a religion: “Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday.” I never took such claims entirely seriously. But then I heard this statement from a Montana writer, Jim Robbins, interviewed by the “sustainability reporters” of government-funded Marketplace Radio:
There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically.
Darned if he isn’t using terms like “atheists” and “disbelief” in a discussion of global warming. Almost as if he were, you know, a theologian.
Reporter Sarah Gardner, by the way, says that “in my own lifetime, average temperatures in this country have gone up more than 2 degrees.” That doesn’t sound like that much — maybe like moving from Washington to Richmond? But anyway, unless Sarah is about 200 years old, she seems to be exaggerating.
For a different view of global warming — not that of an atheist or even a skeptic, just a non-fundamentalist or non-apocalyptic — see this short paper or this book by climatologist Pat Michaels.
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