Archive for November, 2009
Cato Health Care Expert Michael Cannon to Debate Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) Online at 2pm EST Today
Cato director of health policy studies Michael F. Cannon will participate in a live online chat today at the New Haven Register. The event starts at 2pm EST and will last for an hour.
We encourage you to submit questions once the event has started. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) will participate in the chat alongside Cannon.
One Year Later
This morning, Politico’s Arena asks:
“Election 09: What’s the message?”
My response:
A note on NY 23, then to the larger message in yesterday’s returns. Already this morning we’re seeing an effort to spin the NY 23 outcome as a warning to Republicans and a hopeful sign for Democrats. Yet the striking thing about that outcome is how close a third-party candidate came in the face of opposition from the Republican establishment. And the ultimate outcome can doubtless be explained simply by absentee ballots, plus voters unaware of the last-minute developments in the race.
Thus, given those factors, the NY 23 outcome is perfectly consistent with returns in the rest of the country. (In fact, Conservative and Republican votes in that race total more than 50 percent.) And the message will not be lost on blue-dog Democrats. If the internal inconsistencies of ObamaCare did not trouble those Democrats before yesterday, they surely must now. The silence coming from the White House last night spoke volumes.
Hail, Bloomberg, Magister Populi
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has been elected to a third term, despite the two-term limits that New Yorkers voted for twice. His biggest challenge was persuading the City Council to overrule the voters, but he managed that trick thanks to his absolute mastery of money and politics in the Big Apple. And on election day, even his $100 million campaign barely overcame popular anger over the repeal of term limits.
Personally, I wish the Council had just given Bloomberg another term. Don’t get rid of term limits. Just do like the Romans used to do in an emergency. Name Bloomberg “dictator,” an extraconstitutional position with extraordinary authority but limited duration. Then you keep the rules, you just make an exception. And I’m sure Bloomberg would be willing to be addressed as Dictator for the duration of the emergency powers.
Instead, Bloomberg used his money and connections to get the Council to allow all the city officeholders to serve three terms, instead of the two that the people had twice voted for.
He said it was because of the financial crisis — just as Rudolph Giuliani had suggested that the city shouldn’t elect a new mayor in the aftermath of 9/11. Of course, as Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute has shown, New York’s revenues rose 41 percent between 2000 and 2007, while spending increased even faster, so it’s not clear why he’s the man you need in a financial crisis.
But the plutocrat mayor used his personal wealth – and the city’s tax dollars – to pressure people to support his bid to stay in office. Last year the New York Times reported:
The mayor and his top aides have asked leaders of organizations that receive his largess to express their support for his third-term bid by testifying during public hearings and by personally appealing to undecided members of the City Council. …
The requests have put the groups in an unusual and uncomfortable position, several employees of the groups said. City Hall has not made any explicit threats, they said, but city officials have extraordinary leverage over the groups’ finances. Many have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic giving and millions of dollars from city contracts overseen by his staff.
Sounds like a lot of overlap between his personal philanthropy and the city’s own spending, and the Times doesn’t seem to find anything odd about that aspect of the story. And then the New York Post found that the mayor’s tax-funded “slush fund” was being enlisted in the campaign, too:
Mayor Bloomberg showered cash on key City Council members with the power to kill a term-limits extension bill in the last year.
Members of the council’s Government Operations Committee have received millions from Hizzoner’s slush fund, a once-secret pot of taxpayer money the mayor doles out to favored lawmakers for their pet causes….
Five members of the committee secured $3.1 million from the $5.3 million stash in Bloomberg’s 2008 budget. Only three other council members received funds from the mayor in the last year.
And the New York Daily News noted that everyone working for Bloomberg at the City Council hearings is on Mayor Mike’s payroll one way or another:
There was the mayor’s legal counsel and the city’s corporation counsel, both paid with tax dollars, testifying that Bloomberg can and should get another term.
There were aides from the mayor’s Community Assistance Unit, who rounded up pro-Bloomberg speakers from the community and religious and civic groups they work with all day long – many of which thrive on city grants.
There were the dozens of “Ready, Willing and Able” guys from the Doe Fund, which gets funding from the city – and used its vans to bring people to the hearing.
That’s why — to return to my Roman theme – union boss Dennis Rivera came to praise Bloomberg, not to bury him, at a recent campaign event. Hail Bloomberg, Magister Populi, Magister Urbi.
Immigrants Respond to Economic Incentives
As I blogged here, I got my green card in April — and am now counting down the days till I can naturalize (five years from the green card, though you can apply three months before that and processing takes a year or so). Because of my various travails over the years that led to that fortunate day this spring, I’ve learned quite a bit about immigration, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of law. Indeed, both before joining Cato and ever since, it’s been an area in which I’ve been writing and speaking — and I appreciate very much the synergy this work has had with my colleagues in the trade and immigration shop.
One oped I had in National Review Online dealt with H-1Bs, the temporary visas for highly skilled workers to work in the United States. One of the problems with H-1Bs is that they provide no path to a green card (meaning permanent residence) or citizenship — so just as hard-working, tax-paying professionals gain expertise in a particular American company or industry, just as they grow roots in an American community, they have to leave. Nevertheless, there have long been more H-1B applicants than available visas. The last few years, the annual 65,000 quota has been oversubscribed on the very first day of eligibility for each fiscal year!
Well, not any more. As this recent article points out, the recession has impacted our immigration system as well: “A coveted visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier U.S. technology companies and universities [the H-1B program] is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.”
This is just another indication that the free movement of goods, money, and people, will regulate even such perceived social ills as “foreigners taking American jobs.” There’s simply no need for “U.S. citizen only” provisions in (so-called) stimulus bills, or (further) immigration restrictions during bad economic times.
In other words, even foreigners respond to market incentives.
For more on Cato’s work on immigration policy, go here.
Obama, International Law, and Free Speech
Stuart Taylor has a very good article this week about the Obama administration, international law, and free speech. This excerpt begins with a quote from Harold Koh, Obama’s top lawyer at the State Department:
“Our exceptional free-speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” The Supreme Court, suggested Koh — then a professor at Yale Law School — “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation” that he espouses.
Translation: Transnational law may sometimes trump the established interpretation of the First Amendment. This is the clear meaning of Koh’s writings, although he implied otherwise during his Senate confirmation hearing.
In my view, Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away our free-speech rights for the sake of international consensus. “Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech,” as Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an October 19 USA Today op-ed.
Even European nations with much weaker free-speech traditions than ours were reportedly dismayed by the American cave-in to Islamic nations on “racial and religious stereotyping” and the rest.
Read the whole thing.
The Spirit of Nien Cheng (1915-2009)
Nien Cheng, author of best-seller Life and Death in Shanghai and one of the greatest Chinese voices of humanity to have opposed communism, passed away in Washington yesterday. To read her account of the cruelty and madness of the Cultural Revolution, during which she was imprisoned for six-and-a-half years and her daughter killed, is to come away inspired by Nien Cheng’s sheer strength of character and the dignity and power of the individual even in the face of totalitarianism. Her refusal to accept dogmas, her deep understanding and love of Chinese culture and history, her capacity for self-reflection, the way in which she used her learning and sharp wit to confront her oppressors and expose their incoherent views, and her ability to survive persecution—all was truly a triumph of the human spirit.
I had the great good fortune to have known Nien Cheng both through Cato and because she coincidentally lived in the same Washington condominium building as I did for many years until I recently moved. (It was the same building in which she typed her book manuscript once she lived here in exile, never thinking that many people would read it.)
To know Nien Cheng was to confirm the impressions one forms of her from reading her book, and more. As neighbors, we chatted from time to time, and on several occasions my now-wife Lesley and I enjoyed tea and lively discussion in her apartment. Mrs. Cheng was generous and polite, and she was curious about the opinions of others. But she was also very well read, kept up on current affairs, and was opinionated, honest and transparent. She was always insightful. The trappings of political power never impressed her. She was regularly invited as a guest to White House functions by several administrations, but although she was honored, she had long been turning them down because, as she told me, she was too old for such things and it was too much time standing around.
Nien Cheng never liked to waste time and so maintained the habits of an industrious person. Perhaps that was partly a strategy to keep her mind at ease since the death of her daughter tormented her all of her life. I’m sure, however, that she ultimately died in peace. Never displaying an air of self-importance, she was ready and happy to pass on, as she told me and others on more than one occasion. For testifying to the world about the realities of Chinese communism and for living a courageous life, Nien Cheng holds a special place in the hearts and minds of all advocates of the free society, especially the Chinese.
May her spirit live on.
Federal Wages Fly High
Yahoo News is highlighting the story “10 Jobs With High Pay and Minimal Schooling.” Topping the list: air traffic controllers, who work for the federal government.
These workers make sure airplanes land and take off safely, and they typically top lists of this nature. The median 50% earned between $86,860-142,210, with good benefits. Air traffic controllers are eligible to retire at age 50 with 20 years of service, or after 25 years at any age.
Huge salaries and retirement after 20 years — sweet deal!
Air traffic controllers seem to provide a good illustration of my general claim that federal workers are overpaid.
I don’t know what the proper pay level for controllers is, but I do know that we should privatize the system, as Canada has, and let the market figure it out.
Degree Disaster Behind The Great Wall
Based on my regular reading on education, but not China specifically, I know that the world’s most populous nation has had a lot of trouble finding jobs for its throngs of recent college graduates. I wrote a bit about that yesterday, pointing out that the important higher education lesson from China is that pumping out more college grads is meaningless if they don’t have skills that are in demand. Well, thanks to a very helpful Cato@Liberty reader who actually lives in China (and wishes to remain anonymous) I now have a much better idea just how important that lesson is. He directed me to this Asia Times article that includes, among many fascinating tidbits, this startling revelation:
An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers [italics added].
Wow! If this report is accurate, until now I have had no idea how truly ridiculous Washington’s obsession with pumping out more degrees to keep up with the Chinese has been — and I’ve been pretty sure it’s ridiculous! Much more troubling, if I’ve had little clue about the true extent of the absurdity, imagine how far from grasping it our government-loving federal politicians have been! Of course, as I wrote yesterday, even if they did know it, they probably wouldn’t let on.
Tuesday Links
- Three cheers for divided government: “Since the start of the Cold War, we’ve had only a dozen years of real fiscal restraint” …And all of them occurred when the White House and Congress were held by opposite parties.
- Well here’s an idea: Only pay for health care that works.
- The case against tort reform in health care.
- Video: The authors of two new Ayn Rand biographies discuss their work and research.
- Podcast: “Ayn Rand and the World She Made“
History Fun Fact: Ayn Rand Liked Ed Tax Credits
Many thanks to Lisa Snell at Reason for bringing this interesting historical fun fact from 1973 to light: Ayn Rand was a fan of education tax credits:
In the face of such evidence, one would expect the government’s performance in the field of education to be questioned, at the least, [but] the growing failures of the educational establishment are followed by the appropriation of larger and larger sums. There is, however, a practical alternative: tax credits for education.
The essentials of the idea (in my version) are as follows: an individual citizen would be given tax credits for the money he spends on education, whether his own education, his children’s, or any person’s he wants to put through a bona fide school of his own choice (including primary, secondary, and higher education).
Rand’s support for credits is interesting for a number of reasons, not least the fact that she explicitly endorses credits, not vouchers. I’ve had numerous and largely fruitless arguments over which policy is most “free-market” or least distorting. To me it is obvious that credits are the most “free-market” education reform. Now I can skip the arguments and yell, “Ayn Rand!”
Rand’s essay also highlights the fact that education tax credits were, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent private school policy on the scene. Federal tax credits were a live issue under Nixon and Carter. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party gave strong and explicit support for education tax credits throughout the 1980’s – with tax credits, but not vouchers, mentioned specifically in the Republican Party platforms of 1980, 1984, and 1988.
The largely forgotten history of education tax credits . . . interesting . . .
Libertarian Movement — Just Too Big and Too Busy?
Last night — a Monday night, the eve of a hotly contested gubernatorial election in Virginia — there were at least three interesting events for libertarians in the Washington area:
- Reason.tv held an event to launch “Radicals for Capitalism,” a new series of videos celebrating Ayn Rand’s continuing influence.
- The Future of Freedom Foundation and the George Mason University Economics Society sponsored a lecture by Lawrence W. Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, at GMU.
- And here at the Cato Institute, an overflow crowd gathered to watch a new film, The Soviet Story, which the Economist called “the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past.”
It’s got to be a sign of growth and health if the libertarian movement is offering three excellent programs on one Monday night in one area. But what’s an overscheduled libertarian to do?
Don’t Copy Europe’s Mistakes
In this new video, Eline van den Broek of the Netherlands needs only about four minutes to explain why government-run healthcare in Europe is a mistake and why the problems in the U.S. healthcare system are the result of too much government, not too little.
The only thing I don’t like about this video is that I fear people may no longer want to watch the ones I narrate.
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