Archive for March, 2010
When Regulators Attack
No, that’s not the name of a new TV series. We should be so lucky.
It’s actually a good description of the government’s approach to tobacco.
Instead of letting adults make up their own minds about costs and benefits of risky choices (which includes most things in life, such as crossing a street and eating a cheeseburger), nanny-state officials have decided to investigate menthol-flavored cigarettes. And since the Food and Drug Administration has been given authority over the tobacco industry and since the FDA’s supposed purpose is to ensure drugs are “safe and effective,” that almost certainly means this latest campaign will lead to either further restrictions on free speech or outright bans.
Here’s a blurb from the Wall Street Journal:
Congress last year added the tobacco industry to the FDA’s regulatory mix and today a panel of health experts making up the agency’s new Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is kicking off a two-day meeting. First on the agenda: how menthol flavoring in cigarettes affects smokers’ habits. Small wonder that menthol is getting early attention, says the New York Times, which notes menthol butts account for almost a third of the $70 billion U.S. cigarette market.
After more meetings, the advisory panel will send recommendations to the FDA, which could eventually decide to ban menthol products or take steps to curtail their marketing.
One can only wonder how far down the slope we will slide. There already are attacks against fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Both provide pleasure to many people, but that no longer means much in Washington. Will regulators, either at the FDA or elsewhere, eventually decide that anything linked to obesity must be regulated and/or taxed?
And now that government is going to pick up the tab for an even larger share of health costs, how long before the politicians use obesity-related costs as a major justification for further efforts to control our private lives? Maybe some day we will have a Federal Health Police to enforce daily exercise mandates? I better stop now before I give them any ideas.
Policing for Profit
Our friends at the Institute for Justice just released a comprehensive report on the abuses that go on under the legal procedure known as “civil asset forfeiture.” The report is called Policing for Profit (pdf). Here is a short video clip that IJ put together:
Senior IJ attorney Scott Bullock will be speaking on this subject here at the Cato Institute on April 28. Details on that event are forthcoming.
On ObamaCare, Don’t Put Your Faith in the Courts
Now that the Obama health plan is law, more than a dozen states are asserting that Congress has exceeded its Commerce Clause power in imposing a mandate on individuals to purchase health insurance from private companies. No doubt, individual citizens will challenge the individual mandate on their own behalf.
States are also asserting that the threat to withhold all Medicaid payments if the states do not set up health insurance exchanges and enact other regulations amounts to coercion and unconstitutional commandeering of states by the federal government.
No one who opposes ObamaCare should put their faith in the Supreme Court to strike down an act of Congress, no matter how unprecedented and unconstitutional it may be. Nor should those who support ObamaCare be confident that the Supreme Court will uphold these provisions.
Legal challenges cannot take the place of political action. The Court hates to strike down popular legislation, but if the legislation is unpopular, one or both houses of Congress have changed parties and only a filibuster or presidential veto is preventing repeal, then the Court may feel more comfortable upholding the Constitution.
One Nation Under Arrest
Brian Walsh of The Heritage Foundation and Paul Rosenzweig have a new book out, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty.
For an example of how our federal criminal laws have morphed into a leviathan that threatens the liberty of average citizens, take the case of inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson:
In May 2004, FBI agents driving a black Suburban and wearing SWAT gear ran Evertson off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska. When Evertson was face down on the pavement with automatic weapons trained on him, an FBI agent told him he was being arrested because he hadn’t put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package.
A jury in federal court in Alaska acquitted Evertson, but the feds weren’t finished. They reached into their bag of over 4,500 federal crimes and found another ridiculous crime they could use to prosecute him: supposedly “abandoning” hazardous waste (actually storing, in appropriate containers, valuable materials he was using for the clean-fuel technology he was developing). A second jury convicted him, and he spent 21 months in an Oregon federal prison.
Draconian enforcement of regulatory offenses is just the tip of the iceberg. For additional information on the creep of federal criminal law, check out In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” by Tim Lynch, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate, and Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything by Gene Healy.
Will Debate Constitutionality of Obamacare Anytime, Anywhere
Zaid Jilani at the Center for American Progress put up a blog post titled, “College debate organizers unable to find any law professors to argue health reform is unconstitutional.” Indeed, it seems that none of the four panelists at the University of Washington Law School event had any issues with Obamacare.
Maybe the UW organizers, who couldn’t find anyone with the opposing view, are talking to the same folks who told John Conyers about the “Good and Welfare Clause.” Because, as I said before, it’s not that hard to find constitutional scholars who have problems with this legislation.
OK, look, I’ll make it easier: I hereby announce that I am willing to travel anywhere at anytime to debate the constitutionality of Obamacare. Whoever sets up the debate has to pay my travel expenses, but that’s it. Any takers?
Wednesday Links
- John McCain channels Dick Cheney: On March 4, McCain introduced a bill that “would require that anyone anywhere in the world, including American citizens, suspected of involvement in terrorism — including ‘material support’ (otherwise undefined) — can be imprisoned by the military on the authority of the president as commander in chief.”
- President Obama declared passage of a major student-aid reform law yesterday. Will it help? Cato education expert Neal McCluskey calls it a mixed bag.
- Thought experiment: Let’s say for a moment that Congress could actually repeal the health care overhaul. What should they put in its place?
- Should Congress pursue a constitutional amendment that would limit federal spending to one-fifth of the economy?
- Podcast: “Obama’s Intelligence Gathering Needs Oversight” featuring Julian Sanchez.
Excellent Video Channeling Bastiat
Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network has a very concise — yet quite devastating — video exposing the Keynesian fallacy that the destruction of wealth by calamities such as earthquakes or terrorism is good for economic growth. Tom cites the work of Bastiat, who sagely observed that, “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” As you can see from the video, many who pontificate about economic matters today miss this essential insight.
I can’t resist the opportunity to also plug a couple of my own videos that touch on the same issues. Here’s one on Keynesian economics, one on the failure of Obama’s faux stimulus, and another on the policies that actually promote prosperity.
Food Stamps on Campus
Food stamp usage is on an upsurge as a result of the economic downturn and liberalized eligibility. Thanks to some good journalistic work from Aleksandra Kulczuga of the Daily Caller, we’re getting a better picture of how government dependency is spreading to a new generation.
Kulczuga reports that college students are increasingly going on the dole thanks to encouragement from college officials and poverty organizations dedicated to fomenting government dependency.
From the article:
Adam Sylvain, a sophomore at Virginia’s George Mason University, recounted a recent conversation with friends in his dorm room. “My roommate told me he applied for food stamps, and they told him he qualified for $200 a month in benefits,” Sylvain said. “He’s here on scholarship and he saves over $5,000 each summer in cash.”
“A few of our other friends who were in the room also said if there were able to, they would get food stamps … They think that if they’re eligible it’s the government’s fault, so they might as well,” Sylvain said.
Students at GMU can buy a meal plan for $1,275 that provides 10 meals a week for the semester — that’s $71 a week.
When I was in college, my friends and I worked during the school year and through the summer to fund our expenses. My father worked multiple jobs to pay his way through college while supporting a young wife. He grew up in a family headed by a single mother that relied on extended family and charities to help them through tough times. He may have been eligible for food stamps in college, but he would have never taken a government handout.
Today’s generation seems to be different. This Salon article tells of unemployed college grads using food stamps to purchase organic food at high-end grocers like Whole Foods.
From the article:
At Magida’s brick row house in Baltimore, she and Mak minced garlic while observing that one of the upsides of unemployment was having plenty of time to cook elaborate meals, and that among their friends, they had let go of any bad feelings about how their food was procured.
“It’s not a thing people feel ashamed of, at least not around here,” said Mak. “It feels like a necessity right now.”
Savory aromas wafted through the kitchen as a table was set with a heaping plate of Thai yellow curry with coconut milk and lemongrass, Chinese gourd sautéed in hot chile sauce and sweet clementine juice, all of it courtesy of government assistance.
Remember that many of these students probably had their college educations subsidized by the government as well.
“You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better…”
“…a little better all the time.”
Some school choice supporters and philanthropists began to suffer burnout a few years ago, disappointed that private school choice programs had not yet scaled up massively a decade-and-a-half after the first modern program was launched in Milwaukee. That disappointment is likely to give way in the coming years to new hope, and looking back a generation from now, 2010 may well be seen as a turning point in the history of educational freedom.
Last week, a private school choice bill sponsored by a Democrat (the Rev. James Meeks), passed the Democratic-controlled Illinois Senate. Even if this particular bill isn’t enacted into law, the impact of its passage in the Senate will reverberate around the country. Also in the past week, the Florida Senate passed a major expansion of its education tax credit program that would allow that program to expand every year in which demand for it has grown. Should current trends continue, that would allow it to become the biggest private school choice program in the country in a matter of years. It, too, was defended on the Senate floor by African American Democrats. And just a few weeks before that, a Democratic filmmaker saw his pro-school-choice education documentary picked up by Paramount Pictures.
It’s not even April yet!
2010 is shaping up to be a very good year indeed.
Internet Privacy Law Needs an Upgrade
Imagine for a moment that all your computing devices had to run on code that had been written in 1986. Your smartphone is, alas, entirely out of luck, but your laptop or desktop computer might be able to get online using a dial-up modem. But you’d better be happy with a command-line interface to services like e-mail, Usenet, and Telnet, because the only “Web browsers” anyone’s heard of in 1986 are entomologists. Cloud computing? Location based services? Social networking? No can do, though you can still get into a raging debate about the relative merits of Macs and PCs.
When it comes to federal privacy law, alas, we are running on code written in 1986: The Elecronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute that’s not only ludicrously out of date, but so notoriously convoluted and unclear that even legal experts routinely lament the “mess” of electronic privacy law. Scholar Orin Kerr has called it “famously complex, if not entirely impenetrable.” Part of the problem, to be sure, lies with the courts. It is scandalous that in 2010, we don’t even have a definitive ruling on whether or when the Fourth Amendment requires the government to get a search warrant to read e-mails stored on a server. But the ECPA statute, meant to fill the gap left by the courts, reads like the rules of James T. Kirk’s fictional card game Fizzbin.
Tuesday Links
- Why the rich can’t pay for the health care overhaul: “The president intends to squeeze an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes. It won’t work.”
- If you thought last week was a bad time to be a Republican, try the next century: Most demographic trends show Democratic constituencies growing and traditional Republican ones shrinking.
- Malou Innocent on Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan.
- Podcast: “Rating the Rating Houses” featuring William A. Niskanen.
Cell Phones and Ingratitude
When I was a kid in the 1960s and we came back from a visit to my grandmother’s, my mother used to call my grandmother, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. It was important for my grandmother to know that we’d arrived home safely, but long-distance telephone calls were too expensive to indulge in unnecessarily. When I entered Vanderbilt University in 1971, my parents had to decide whether to pay for a telephone in my dorm room. They decided to do so, but most of the thoroughly upper-middle-class students on my floor did not have phones. Phones cost real money back then. Then came the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in 1984. Phone technology and competitive service provision exploded. In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.
Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon. You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos — oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago.
And to celebrate this incredible achievement, Slate and the New America Foundation are holding a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible.”
This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain. I was reading some of Deirdre McCloskey’s forthcoming book Bourgeois Dignity this week. She points out that the average person lived on the equivalent of $3 a day in 1800. Today there are six and a half times as many people, but the average person earns and consumes 10 times as much, far more than that in the most capitalist countries. And yet some people, most leftist intellectuals, continue to ignore what McCloskey calls “the gigantic gains from bourgeois dignity and liberty” and to denounce the markets, economic liberalization, and globalization that have liberated billions of people from eons of back-breaking labor.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of consumer reporting and analysis, which is an important part of a robust marketplace. Competition and consumer reporting both help to keep prices low and quality improving. And there’s plenty of room for criticism of cell phone pricing, contracting, and service. But when a discussion like this is held by a public policy research organization and a public-affairs magazine as part of a program on public policy, then it’s not just consumer advice. It is presumably a discussion of what the sluggish, coercive institution of government can do to improve — or more likely impede — a fabulously dynamic, constantly improving consumer-directed industry. And that usually ends in tears.
Maybe we should hold a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? And Watch Me on Video? And Read My Book on Your Handheld Device? And Check Your Blood Pressure and Glucose? How Markets, Innovation, and Entrepreneurs Have Taken Cell Phone Technology from Clunker to Computer in Barely a Generation.”
Bret Stephens’ Sophistry
Does Bret Stephens really want us to believe that our support for Israeli expansionism has nothing to do with Muslims’ perception of the United States?
The Roots of Muslim Rage?
According to his column in today’s Wall Street Journal, he does. The basic gist is as follows:
- Sayyid Qutb was a crucial theorist of Islamic resistance more than half a century ago;
- Qutb was revolted at what he saw (then!) as sexual licentiousness and general cultural looseness among Americans;
- Therefore, sexy American women including “Lady Gaga–or, if you prefer, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Marilyn Monroe [and] Josephine Baker” have more to do with our terrorism problem than does our unswerving support for Israeli expansionism.
You can take this sort of argument in lots of different directions. Try this one: Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps the first neoconservative, was a big racist. Lots of his support for American imperialism derived from the fact that he was a big racist. Therefore, the reason American neoconservatives like Bret Stephens support American imperialism is because they are big racists.
To be sure, there probably are neoconservatives who want to beat up on the Arabs because of racism. But it’s not fair to tar Stephens with that brush simply because he hews to an ideology that was influenced in crucial ways by big racists like TR.
Getting back to the substance of the piece, Stephens takes his argument all the way, writing that “to imagine that [Israeli] settlements account for even a fraction of the rage that has inhabited the radical Muslim mind since the days of Qutb is fantasy: The settlements are merely the latest politically convenient cover behind which there lies a universe of hatred.” This armchair psychiatry formulation helpfully gets Stephens far away from the realm of falsifiability.
Dangerously, though, Stephens veers back toward falsifiability by writing that “the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West” is that we’re too sexed-up. This is, of course, not accurate. Bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa, after all, was not titled “Declaration of War against the Americans with their Supple Buttocks and Protuberant Breasts.” Instead, it was called “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” Or you can take a look at the second fatwa, released in 1998. The three big claims made against us in there were
- Our presence in Saudi Arabia and support for the Saudi government, which he hates;
- Our sanctions regime against Iraq and its alleged effects on Iraqi civilians; and
- Our support for Israel.
There’s a lot you can do with this information, up to and including supposing that bin Laden would not be satisfied even if these three conditions were somehow removed. You can also read the actual fatwas and conclude that the Israel stuff was far from the centerpiece of the argument and seemed sort of tacked on at the end for good measure. I actually think both these arguments are good ones. But actually thinking about what’s in those texts should cause you to ask why, of all the grievances he could have lodged, including our reverence for Josephine Baker, did he pick those three issues? The answer that presents itself is that he is not an idiot and he thinks the three points he made will be most effective in recruiting people to the cause.
Once again, there’s a lot you can do with this, up to and including saying you don’t care what effect our policies may have on al Qaeda recruiting, continuing them is worth a lot to us so we’re going to do so. And that’s fine. But Stephens’ cute argumentation and burial of basic facts about these yahoos isn’t doing a service to the debate over what to do about them.
Similarly, Stephens could have looked for actual research on the topic. For example, public opinion scholars Andrew Kohut and Richard Wike drew on six years of survey data in the Islamic world and concluded in 2008 that while “America’s image in much of the Muslim world remains abysmal,” “most of the story is opposition to American foreign policy rather than value divides or religious-based enmity.” Or look at the U.S. Defense Department’s reporting on the issue: “American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies…Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” [.pdf] Basically everybody who’s studied this question in any detail agrees with this general argument.
Stephens has a great pulpit on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page. He should have more respect for his readers and more deference to the truth.
Update: Andrew Exum has more.
The Number of Congressional Staff Is the Real Problem
There’s been a bit of buzz about a recent story in Politico revealing a huge increase in the number of congressional staff receiving six-figure salaries. Some of the details are eye-openers, including a 39 percent increase in the past four years in the number of staffers earning at least $163,358:
Nearly 2,000 House of Representatives staffers pulled down six-figure salaries in 2009, including 43 staffers who earned the maximum $172,500 — or more than three times the median U.S. household income. …But while these top earners are a small percentage of the overall congressional work force, their numbers are growing at a rapid rate under the Democratic Congress. The number of staffers earning within the upper 3 percent of House salaries — currently $163,358 or more — has increased by nearly 39 percent in the past four years, according to LegiStorm data. …“These are people who could be making a lot more money in the private sector, but they choose to work here,” said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly, who also makes $172,500. …There are approximately 10,000 House staffers, including district office workers, according to the chief administrative officer.
Even though I’m a former Hill staffer, I’m certainly not going to defend these salaries (especially since I was nowhere near the top of the pay structure!). But excessive pay is actually a secondary problem. The real issue is the explosion in the number of staff. The image below, taken from a 1993 congressional report, shows the increase in the number of staff for each member of the House of Representatives. This doesn’t include, incidentally, the increase in committee staff and the growth in auxiliary institutions such as the Congressional Budget Office (the folks who just told us that a giant new entitlement program would reduce red ink).
It’s a chicken-and-egg issue whether this bloated congressional staff structure is a result of bigger government, or whether it contributes to bigger government. In either case, it would be a good idea to go back to the number of staff — and size of government — we had in the past.
ObamaCare: Still a Bad Deal for Young Adults
The Associated Press reports that young adults will face higher premiums under ObamaCare:
Beginning in 2014, most Americans will be required to buy insurance or pay a tax penalty. That’s when premiums for young adults seeking coverage on the individual market would likely climb by 17 percent on average, or roughly $42 a month, according to an analysis of the plan conducted for The Associated Press. The analysis did not factor in tax credits to help offset the increase.
The higher costs will pinch many people in their 20s and early 30s who are struggling to start or advance their careers with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years.
The article cited additional studies estimating premiums increases young adults as high as 50 percent. That was essentially the message of my recent Cato briefing paper, “ObamaCare: A Bad Deal for Young Adults.”
Supporters claim the new law provides subsidies that would help people afford the higher premiums. As I write in my paper, however:
The money for those subsidies has to come from somewhere, though. Presumably, some of it would come from young adults themselves in the form of higher taxes or the tax penalties imposed on those who do not purchase insurance…So the presence of subsidies does not necessarily mean that young adults would come out winners. Ironically, all the complexity may actually help the legislation pass Congress precisely because it obscures whom the legislation would tax.
Supporters also claim that although the higher premiums might be actuarially unfair for people who are young and healthy today, those people will eventually be old and unhealthy. Over the course of a lifetime, they reason, such policies would be closer to actuarially fair.
The problem is that we’ve heard this line before. Inter-generational redistribution is fundamentally unfair to the young because it creates a situation where the old, who vote, have incentives to ratchet up benefits – and to ratchet up taxes on the young, who don’t vote. Social Security collects from the young and gives to the old, and is clearly a net tax on the young. As Jonathan Gruber reports, the young have very little confidence – deservedly so – in Social Security’s implicit promises. Experience shows that whatever new taxes ObamaCare imposes on the young will grow over time.
Regardless, most young uninsured people already obtain insurance as they get older. As I report in my paper, 30.4 percent of those age 20-29 were uninsured in 2008 (including 33.8 percent of 23-year-olds), but only 13.4 percent of those aged 50-64 years were uninsured. So a significant number of uninsured young adults naturally transition into insured older adults. The main effect of the new law will be to take young adults who think health insurance is a bad deal at today’s prices and force them to health insurance at even higher prices.
Obama to Increase FHA Risk
The Federal Housing Administration is heading toward a taxpayer bailout, yet the president’s latest mortgage modification plan would further increase the agency’s exposure to risky mortgages. Mark Calabria calls it a “Backdoor Bank Bailout.”
The administration’s plan would encourage borrowers who owe more than their house is worth to refinance into FHA-insured mortgages. Therefore, the risk of a future foreclosure on these mortgages would fall to the government and taxpayers instead of private lenders.
A recent study from economists at New York University found that the FHA is underestimating its risk exposure. One of the problems is that the FHA isn’t properly accounting for the risk to underwater FHA mortgages that have been refinanced into new FHA mortgages. So it’s hard to see how the president’s plan to refinance private underwater mortgages into FHA mortgages won’t further exacerbate the situation.
To get these mortgages in better shape so the FHA can insure them, $14 billion in TARP money is going to be used to pay private lenders to reduce the amount borrowers owe on their mortgages. Some of this money will also be used to cover eventual losses on these loans. As a taxpayer whose mortgage is underwater, and who would rather go bankrupt than accept a government handout, I find it infuriating that my tax dollars are being used to bail out others in a similar situation.
But with government housing programs, it’s standard practice for officials to cannonball into the pool and worry about who gets splashed by the water later. On Sunday, CNN.com reported on “FHA’s Florida Fiasco,” where the collapse of the heavily FHA-insured condo market has contributed to the possibility of a FHA bailout. The FHA has now tightened its condo standards, but once again it’s a day late and possibly more than few bucks short.
The new FHA initiative is the latest in a series of efforts to “stabilize” the housing market with more subsidies. Policymakers seem oblivious that it was government interventions that helped instigate the housing meltdown to begin with. The housing market would stabilize itself if the supply of and demand for housing was allowed to be brought back into equilibrium. There would be pain in the short-term, but in the long-term we would have a smoother functioning housing market. Unfortunately, for politicians the long-term means the next election.
Why Do Libertarians Care about Federalism?
That’s the question NYU law professor Rick Hills asks over at PrawfsBlaws:
So why do American libertarians think that federalism is consistent with their commitment to individual liberty? Why not, instead, support a strong national government that can suppress subnational trade wars and protect a robust set of national liberties? What’s the payoff, in terms of individual liberty, from protecting subnational jurisdictions’ exclusive jurisdiction over certain topics?
In other words, if government is bad, why do we want a multiplicity of governments — federal, state, local — all presumably restricting individual liberty in some way?
Well, with all due respect to Prof. Hills — who also graciously commended Cato’s brief in Comstock, in which we argue that that Congress cannot enact a civil commitment statute for sexual predators because there is no such enumerated power and it cannot be inferred from the Necessary & Proper Clause — his analysis erroneously assumes that libertarians (he specifically mentions Cato, our senior fellow Randy Barnett, and our adjunct scholar Ilya Somin) are results-oriented in our approach to constitutional interpretation. And we shouldn’t pursue federalism, he says, because it’s against our interests.
Both of these premises are flawed. I won’t go into much detail because Randy and (the other) Ilya have already provided reactions at the Volokh Conspiracy here and here, with which I agree. First , we like federalism because that’s the system the Constitution set up and luckily, the Constitution is, for the most part, a libertarian document. Second, the Framers set up the Constitution that way because the different levels of government would exist not to multiply power-hungry bureaucrats’ opportunities for mischief but precisely to disallow dangerous aggregations of power. So from the get-go there was no possibility of federal tyranny and, after the Fourteenth Amendment empowered Congress and federal courts to protect individual rights against state infringement, there was to be no state tyranny either.
And so, much as we like the strict limitations on Congress’s power — the express enumerations of Article I, section 8, the Commerce Clause, etc. — we also like the Due Process, Equal Protection, and Privileges or Immunities Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. There is thus no conflict between federalism as a structural constitutional provision that promotes liberty and other, “anti-federalist” provisions that also promote liberty. In practice that means there is no conflict between arguing that Obamacare exceeds the federal government’s authority while asking the Supreme Court to strike down Chicago’s handgun ban. The original meaning of the relevant constitutional provisions support both arguments — and both arguments enhance liberty!
It really is a remarkable document, this Constitution. Too bad its proper understanding has been lost.
For related thoughts on this fascinating debate, Randy proposes a constitutional amendment that might get us back to the federalism we once knew while (the other) Ilya dispels another of Prof. Hills’s minor premises, that European libertarians diverge from Americans on the issue of federalism.
TLF Celebrates 5,000 Posts
The TechLiberationFront blog is celebrating its 5,000th post. If you’re interested in free-market technology policy, it’s a good read.
Are We Really Going to Leave Iraq? (part III)
I’ve been asking this question for a while now (see here and here). Now the influential liberal foreign policy analyst Kenneth Pollack and coauthor worry that the United States is headed for “premature evacuation” [.pdf] in Iraq. Pollack and coauthor argue that “if the United States turns away from Iraq prematurely, it would have dire consequences for Iraq, whose fragile government will be more likely to fail, and for the United States, because success in Iraq is vital to U.S. interests.” Accordingly, the United States needs to aim at “securing a new agreement with the Iraqi government that would allow U.S. military forces to remain in the country beyond 2011.”
Oh, and it’s not just Iraq. “Like Iraq, Afghanistan will require roughly 50,000 U.S. combat troops, probably rebadged as advisors, for many more years before it is able to stand on its feet.”
It seems cruelly ironic that Pollack, whose most recent book is titled A Path Out of the Desert, seems only to have a bottomless stack of plans to keep America stuck on the treadmill in the desert he urged us onto more than seven years ago.
I’ve only skimmed the piece, so maybe there’s more going on here, but this drip, drip, drip of Beltway elites urging the president to stick around for several more years is cause for alarm. (And cause for me to start thinking about drawing up odds about whether we’re going to actually leave.)
Keep in mind, the president doesn’t have anybody who vocally opposed the Iraq war in the upper echelons of his administration, so there likely is nobody on hand to challenge the logic that “success in Iraq is vital to U.S. interests.” It’s like it’s 2002 all over again. With the economy in the front of the president’s brain, he seems much more likely to outsource foreign policy decisions to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the gaggle of “strategic class” foreign policy elites they brought into office with them. And the American people seem less likely to punish him if he does so.
Thoughts on Five-Day Mail
The USPS has taken the first step toward reducing mail delivery to five days a week by sending a request to the Postal Regulatory Commission. However, it will be ultimately up to Congress whether or not Saturday delivery is eliminated.
The USPS, which is in a death spiral, views the elimination of Saturday mail delivery service as a step toward regaining its financial footing. Not surprisingly, the decision is proving controversial among some members of Congress.
Here’s a better idea: give Americans the freedom to choose the mail services they want by repealing the USPS monopoly. That way consumers and businesses could choose to provide and use mail services zero days a week or seven days a week.
Online movie rental services like Netflix offer a small example. A lot of folks time their Netflix rentals so that they have movies for Saturday night. Eliminating Saturday delivery will necessarily degrade the quality of online movie rental services that people are paying for. With competition, Netflix could offer Saturday (or even Sunday) delivery through a private alternative. Perhaps there would be a surcharge, but at least consumers would be allowed to make that choice.
Supporters of the government mail monopoly regularly cite their amazement that they can drop a letter in a mailbox and it will arrive unharmed in another mailbox clear across the country. As a $70 billion operation with the largest workforce in the country, I would hope the USPS can pull off such a feat.
I find it more impressive that I can go into a grocery store almost anywhere in the country and be met with an incalculable number of choices. Take Coke products for instance. I recently made a list of the various Coke products available to me at a local grocery store. The following is just a sample: regular Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke, Diet Caffeine-free Coke, Coke Zero, Coke with Splenda, Coke with Lime, Coke with Lemon, and Diet Coke Plus. Don’t like Coke? There’s a similar array of Pepsi products. Don’t like either? The grocery stores also offer pricier micro-brands with all sorts of unique flavors.
These choices reflect the awesome power of the market, which provides nearly all the goods and services people want without any direction from officials in Washington. It would interesting to see what sorts of innovations and products private mail deliverers would come up with if the government’s mail monopoly didn’t exist. Instead, Americans are stuck with a government operation whose floundering business model will require it to raise prices while simultaneously reducing its services. So much for freedom of choice.
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