Archive for March, 2010
Weekend Links
- Michael Cannon exposes and corrects seven myths about the health care overhaul.
- The real problem with the American health care system: Nearly nine of ten medical dollars is paid in the first instance by someone else. When you don’t have skin in the game, there’s little incentive to keep costs down.
- GOP Reps say that most Republicans in Congress now think the Iraq War was a mistake.
- “In sheep’s clothing”…how to spot a politician who calls himself a libertarian, but is really just another conservative.
- Podcast: “Transparency Suffers in Health Care Fight” featuring Jim Harper.
The FTC on Steroids: Will the ‘National Nanny’ Take Over the Internet and the New Information Economy?
Writing on the TechLiberationFront blog, Berin Szoka warns of the extensive Internet regulation that could come with huge grants of authority to the Federal Trade Commission in H.R. 4173, the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.”
Congress is about to reinvent the FTC as the “National Nanny” it was well on its way to becoming back in the 1970s. Today, the FTC is not merely the general overseer of our economy, but the key regulator of the Internet. If the Senate passes Rep. Frank’s bill with its so-called “improvements” to the FTC Act, future generations will look back and wonder why, without even taking the time to consider what it was doing, Congress radically transformed Internet governance as an afterthought to financial regulatory overhaul.
Schumer and Graham on Immigration Reform: Why Not Do it Without the Biometric National ID?
There is much to commend in the op-ed on immigration reform that Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published in this morning’s Washington Post. Unfortunately, they lead with their worst idea: a biometric national ID card, mandatory for all American workers.
Here’s the good: “Americans overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration and support legal immigration,” they say. “Throughout our history, immigrants have contributed to making this country more vibrant and economically dynamic.”
Their plan includes problem-solving proposals: “creating a process for admitting temporary workers” and “implementing a tough but fair path to legalization.” The latter would reduce the population of illegal aliens in the U.S.—good—and the former would reduce the need to enter illegally in the first place—also good.
Joined with the enhanced border security they propose, these ideas would address the immigration challenge as well as anyone knows how. (Details matter, and my colleagues will have more to say, I’m sure.)
But then there is their gratuitous national ID proposal for all American workers, and stepped up interior enforcement. “Interior enforcement” is a euphemism for “rounding up illegal workers” under some administrations and “raiding employers” under others.
This is the most specific Senator Schumer has ever been about his biometric national ID proposal, though he’s had it in mind since at least 2007. But it is hardly satisfactory, and the claim there will be no national ID database is almost certainly not true.
Here is the paragraph that captures the senators’ plan:
Read the rest of this post »
Davy Crockett’s Lesson for Congress
Fess Parker, the actor who portrayed both Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone in classic television shows, has died at the age of 85. In his honor, I offer this version of Parker singing the theme song “The Ballad of Davy Crockett“:
And more substantively, I note that Col. David Crockett served three terms in Congress from Tennessee, where he is best known for delivering a speech known as “Not Yours to Give.” In response to a proposal for an appropriation to benefit the widow of a naval officer, Rep. Crockett said:
I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. …
We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.
He went on to quote a constituent who had complained when he previously voted for a similar measure:
The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.
He may not actually have patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell, but he did his best to preserve the Constitution.
SAFRA-ficed?
Here’s a quick, preliminary reaction to the higher-education portion of the mammoth health-care reconciliation bill. I could find I’m wrong about some stuff as I delve more deeply into the bill’s language, but it appears that much of the out-of-control spending that would have occurred under the odious Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act has been axed under reconciliation. SAFRA, it appears, has been sacrificed, though to bring to life an even more destructive demon.
Unfortunately, some of SAFRA survived. While a great deal of the spending has been stripped out, reconciliation would still tighten the federal government’s already iron grip on college financing. It would also plow billions more into Pell grants despite decades of evidnece that schools just eat such increases by raising prices. And don’t be fooled by the deceptive accounting in which administrative costs for guaranteed lending are counted as mandatory, but for direct lending as discretionary. When one fully accounts for the costs of going to all direct lending the estimated savings drop from $19.4 billion to $14.4 billion between 2010 and 2019, a sizable chunk of change for a nation so in debt it needs to save every penny it can.
GOP Congressmen: Most Republicans Now Think Iraq War Was a Mistake
In a Thursday panel at Cato on conservatism and war, U.S. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and John Duncan (R-Tenn.) revealed that the vast majority of GOP members of Congress now think it was wrong for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003.
The discussion was moderated by Grover Norquist, who asked the congressmen how many of their colleagues now think the war was a mistake.
Rohrabacher:
“I will say that the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake. …Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood… all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”
McClintock:
“I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”
Watch the clip:
Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional Amendment
Lawrence Lessig has proposed a constitutional amendment in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. It reads:
“Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.”
In Citizens United, the Court said that the First Amendment concerns speech rather than speakers. Congress has no power to discriminate against speakers; hence, a source of speech – people organized as a corporation – could not be prohibited from speaking (or funding speech).
Professor Lessig hopes to introduce a discrimination among speakers into the First Amendment. His proposed discrimination will not lose a popularity contest. He wishes to allow Congress to control the speech of non-citizens. He follows two lines of argument in support of his amendment, one less rational than the other.
The less rational line of appeal to the reader is both implicit and predictable. The Chinese are invoked along with the Chamber of Commerce. A denial of xenophobic intent follows immediately, and “We the People” appear near the end. Carl Schmitt would recognize the rhetorical construction of “friend and enemy.” Rather cleverly, Lessig manages to equate the foreign devils with the internal demons of the liberal mind. Corporations (including the Sierra Club?) and the Chinese (or other foreigner) are on one side of political struggles while “We the People” are on the other.
Joe Scarborough on War
Former Congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough delivered the keynote address at today’s conference on the topic of conservatism and the war in Afghanistan.
During his speech, Scarborough took on neo-conservatives, Obama’s foreign policy record since taking office, and why the United States is still at war.
“In 2010, there’s not much difference between the Republicans’ view on foreign policy and the Democrats’ view of foreign policy,” said Scarborough. “President Obama… this anti-war president, has doubled the number of troops to Afghanistan to nearly 100,000… and he’s continued the transformation of the Afghanistan effort from a counterterrorism mission to a nation-building mission.”
For more, listen in:
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Who I’m Not Voting For
It’s that time of year again, when friends start telling me about this or that candidate I should support because he or she is a dedicated defender of liberty and limited government. I’m a political junkie, so I love getting these recommendations. But I don’t end up supporting or contributing to many candidates. In my view, it’s not enough for a candidate to say that he’s ”committed to slashing wasteful spending, providing tax relief, and eliminating red tape.” What’s your actual tax plan? What spending do you propose to cut or eliminate? Not many of them offer clear answers to that.
And liberty involves more than just economics. Often I’m told, “Congressman X is a libertarian.” I always check, and then I say, “He voted for the war, the Patriot Act, and the Federal Marriage Amendment. Sounds like a conservative.” Now a conservative who opposed President George W. Bush’s trillion-dollar spending increase, his Medicare expansion, and his stepped-up federal involvement in education is a lot better than your average member of Congress. But those votes do not a libertarian make.
This year I’m looking for candidates who stand for freedom across the board, who want government constrained by the Constitution, who believe in the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
And that means I don’t want to back candidates who support
- the war in Iraq
- the war in Afghanistan
- war with Iran
- the war on drugs
- the constitutional amendment to override state marriage laws and make gay people second-class citizens
- the president’s power to snatch American citizens off the street and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge
- new restrictions on immigration
So don’t everybody write at once. But I’ll be looking out for political candidates who support liberty and limited government across a wide range of issues.
Moody’s Mulls Downgrading U.S. Debt
The U.S. isn’t Greece. Yet.
Moody’s is no longer so sure about the quality of Uncle Sam’s debt. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:
The US needs to make significant government spending cuts or else risk losing its gold-plated credit rating that has made extensive borrowing so affordable, Moody’s Investor Service said late Monday.
The announcement was a sobering warning that the country’s burgeoning debt has weakened the country’s economic standing, and that US Treasury Bonds, traditionally a bullet-proof investment, could lose their sterling Aaa-rating if Washington cannot control its federal debt.
If Moody’s were to downgrade the country’s rating, the impact could be severe. It would signal to lenders worldwide that the US is no longer one of the safest places to invest money.
That, in turn, would threaten the country’s ability to borrow freely and extensively from other countries on favorable terms. Investors would likely demand a higher interest rate to finance US debt, which would push federal debt higher still.
“There’s a profound effect in this announcement,” says Max Fraad Wolff, a professor of economics at New School University in New York. “The US has always been the gold standard … and this begins to signal a fall or weakness in US global economic position. That’s a bit like a sea change.”
Obviously we are long overdue for some fiscal responsibility in Washington. And that means cutting spending across the board. Lawmakers might start by considering what programs are authorized by the Constitution–and the far larger number which represent unconstitutional political power grabs.
Lies, Damned Lies, and CBO Estimates
Washington is buzzing with news that the Congressional Budget Office has a new cost estimate for the President’s proposal to further expand the federal government’s control over the health care system. The White House is doubtlessly pleased because the takeaway message, as blindly regurgitated by the Associated Press, is that a giant new entitlement program is going to “drive down red ink:”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over its first 10 years, and continue to drive down the red ink thereafter. Democratic leaders said the deficit would be cut $1.2 trillion in the second decade – and Obama called it the biggest reduction since the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton put the federal budget on a path to surplus.
Michael Cannon already has explained that the cost estimate is fraudulent because of what it leaves out, so let me explain why it is fraudulent because of what it includes. The CBO has a very dismal track record of getting the numbers wrong, in part because there is no attempt to measure how a bigger burden of government has negative macroeconomic effects, but also because the number crunchers do a poor job of measuring the degree to which people (recipients, health care providers, state and local politicians, etc.) will modify their behavior to become eligible for other people’s money. The problem is compounded by similar mistakes for revenue estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation, which (like CBO) makes no attempt to capture macroeconomic effects and has a less-than-stellar history of predicting behavioral responses.
If the legislation passes, we will get more spending, more taxes, and more debt. Equally troubling, we will get more dependency. That’s good for Washington and bad for the country.
Run Away from ‘Common’ Education Standards
A couple of days ago, Fordham Institute president Chester Finn declared on NRO that conservatives should embrace new, national education standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Today I respond to him on The Corner, and let’s just say it’s clear that neither conservatives, nor anybody else, should embrace national standards.
Oh, one more thing: I shouldn’t have to keep saying this to savvy Washington insiders like the folks at Fordham, but when the federal government bribes states with their own citizens’ tax money to do something, doing that thing is hardly voluntary, at least in any reasonable sense.
For more wise thoughts on the national standards issue, check out this interview with Jay Greene, and this Sacramento Bee piece by Ben Boychuk. Oh, and this interview with yours truly.
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