Archive for April, 2010
Weekend Links
- A video challenge: Cato legal scholar Ilya Shapiro says he will debate whether Obamacare is constitutional “anytime, anyplace.”
- Not a pretty picture: The economic consequences of imposing more trade sanctions on Chinese imports.
- Real education reform: Unleash the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace so that children can thrive and benefit from teaching methods that fit their unique needs and abilities.
- Taking a second look at the Swiss model: Switzerland manages to run a smaller government as a share of gross domestic product than the United States and most other countries while providing a higher level of service, security, prosperity and freedom. How does it do that?
- Podcast: “Obamacare’s Unconstitutional Coercion,” featuring Robert A. Levy.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- The U.S. Postal Service wants to drop Saturday mail delivery to save money. Here’s a better idea: give Americans the freedom to choose the mail services they want by repealing the USPS monopoly.
- Obama’s latest mortgage bailout plan will expose the Federal Housing Administration to more risk.
- Unemployed college grads are using food stamps to purchase organic food at high-end grocers like Whole Foods.
- Obama’s crackdown on improper payments made by government programs probably won’t help taxpayers.
- Congress needs more legislators like William Proxmire who was willing to stand up to his colleagues and special interests when it came to cutting wasteful programs.
I’m Sick of Central Planners
Education scholar Diane Ravitch has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that the nation needs to change course on K-12 education.
Ravitch was a supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act, but now she says “we wasted eight years with the ‘measure and punish’ strategy of NCLB.”
So central planning of the nation’s schools from Washington didn’t work under George W. Bush, but now Ravitch has a whole bunch of new central planning ideas for the schools. She uses the phrases “we need” and “we must” repeatedly, implying that we should impose new national rules of her choosing on all the schools.
She says: ”Everyone agrees that good education requires good teachers. To get good teachers, states should insist — and the federal government should demand — that all new teachers have a major in the subject they expect to teach…”
In the column, Ravitch laments the unexpected negative consequences of NCLB, but she seems not to realize that the new policies she advocates would probably also have negative consequences. Wouldn’t demands that teachers have certain degrees push up teaching costs at a time when schools are already complaining that their budgets are stretched tight? Wouldn’t her mandate cause schools to substitute teachers with paper qualifications but poor teaching skills for other teachers who have better teaching skills? Is having a degree in a specific subject more important than teachers having qualities such as empathy, patience, and love of learning?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, and I’m not an education expert. But I do know that the experts often disagree on the best teaching methods and that the established educational wisdom is always evolving. For that reason, one-size-fits-all decrees from Washington make absolutely no sense. So why should Ravitch impose her judgment regarding teacher qualifications on all 100,000 or so public schools in America?
Let’s let the nation’s schools in their local communites try new approaches, learn from each other, and move the ball forward as they see fit. And let’s encourage folks like Ravitch to run for her local school board if she has ideas about schooling that she wants to experiment with.
More on the (Un)Constitutionality of Obamacare
Earlier this week, I reacted to reports that the University of Washington couldn’t find any legal scholars willing to question Obamacare’s constitutionality by issuing a challenge: I will debate the constitutional merits of Obamacare against anyone, anytime, anywhere (as long as the sponsoring group/individual covers my travel expenses). Here’s a video version of my challenge:
Cato adjunct scholars Dave Kopel and Ilya Somin, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy, go into much greater depth on the myth of an expert consensus.
And if you’re tired of hearing the debate about the debate and want to hear the latest on why the individual mandate is unconstitutional, listen to my colleague (and Cato’s chairman) Bob Levy’s podcast.
Journalists Condemn Attack on the Free Press in Ecuador
On Monday I wrote about an Ecuadorian court’s sentencing of Emilio Palacio, editor of the opinion section of El Universo, to three years in jail. Since then, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has expressed “profound concern” about the prison sentence for Palacio, and the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have strongly condemned it.
Op-ed writers from leading national newspapers have signed a statement condemning the court’s decision. This statement was published in El Comercio, El Universo, Diario HOY and La Hora. So far 47 columnists have signed on. See an updated list here of those of us who express our solidarity with the accused journalist.
The Most Fitting Tribute to Jaime Escalante
Jaime Escalante, the brilliant teacher immortalized in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, died this week at the age of 79. I write today in the Wall Street Journal about his incredible achievements and the scandalous way that he was treated by the American education system.
I argue that the most fitting tribute we can offer Escalante is to ensure that, in the future, other great educators are recognized and rewarded for their service, and helped to reach a mass audience of pupils instead of being demoted and pushed out of the system, as he was.
Constitution, Schmonstitution — The Law Is What I Say It Is
The health care debate has illuminated how little regard many members of Congress have for the U.S. Constitution.
First, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) said, “There ain’t no rules here… When the deal goes down … we make ‘em up as we go along.”
Then, House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) claimed that the Constitution’s non-existent “Good and Welfare clause” grants Congress the power to compel Americans to purchase health insurance.
Now, Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL) admits he doesn’t really care whether the Constitution grants Congress that power:
Off-camera: Where in the Constitution…
Rep. Hare: I don’t worry about the Constitution on this, to be honest.
Off-camera: [Laughter.] Jackpot, brother.
Rep. Hare: What I care more about — I care more about the people that are dying every day that don’t have health insurance.
Off-camera: You care more about that than the U.S. Constitution that you swore to uphold!
Rep. Hare: I believe that it says we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now you tell me…
Off-camera: That’s the Declaration of Independence.
Rep. Hare: It doesn’t matter to me. Either one…
[Lots of childish sniping.]
Off-camera: Where in the Constitution does it give you the authority to…
Rep. Hare: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Off-camera: That’s what I thought.
Of course, that doesn’t really capture how annoying both the congressman and his interrogators are. So here’s the video:
1994 Watch
The CBS News Poll reports that President Obama’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest point (of that poll) of 44 percent. Also, his work on the health care law might be a contributing factor. Onlly 34 percent approved of his performance on health care while 55 percent disapproved.
At the end of March 1994, Bill Clinton enjoyed a 51 percent approval rating.
Two caveats: First, other factors besides presidential approval affect the outcomes of mid-term congressional elections. Second, Clinton’s approval rating dropped like a stone in September and October of 1994. He ended up in the mid-40s by election day. In other words, Clinton ended up where Obama is now. Obama’s approval rating could rise between now and November.
Insecurity Cameras
Nearly half of the security cameras in the New York City subway system don’t work. That may seem like cause for alarm, and it may be from a financial standpoint — NYC isn’t getting a lot of return on its investment.
From a broader security standpoint, I don’t find this particularly disturbing. As the article points out, crime is down as ridership increases. Reducing the number of police officers on patrol in the subway (as NYC is doing) is more likely to facilitate increased criminality. A camera can catch many things on film, but the presence of law enforcement officers provides intangible benefits that technology cannot. The would-be Millenium Bomber was stopped by a border patrol agent who interviewed him and thought that something was “hinky” about his behavior. That hinkiness involved explosives, and the plot was foiled. Cameras don’t spot “hinky” like people can.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has been talking about this on his blog (emphasis on the Dubai assassination), and provides a fuller discussion of security cameras in this article on CNN.com:
If universal surveillance were the answer, lots of us would have moved to the former East Germany. If surveillance cameras were the answer, camera-happy London, with something like 500,000 of them at a cost of $700 million, would be the safest city on the planet.
We didn’t, and it isn’t, because surveillance and surveillance cameras don’t make us safer. The money spent on cameras in London, and in cities across America, could be much better spent on actual policing.
Security cameras have not proven a great deterrent to crime or terrorism. The attacks on September 11th and the London commuter bombings were not stopped by pre-attack footage of the perpetrators’ activities. Creating a surveillance state may make some people feel safer, but the resources can be better used elsewhere.
The Threat that Guam Will Capsize
At least when it comes to economic matters, a way of framing the question whether market regulation or government regulation should predominate is to ask which system—markets or government—can better allocate resources.
Many people assume that elected officials, their staffs, and bureaucracies in the executive branch have superior information and thus better capability of organizing society’s affairs. There are many smart, well-informed people in government doing their best at just that task.
But evidence of their fallibility is sometimes made available. Such is in the video that follows, in which a member of Congress worries—in apparent seriousness—whether the island of Guam might capsize.
If it seems cruel to tout, or unfair to generalize from this to the weakness of government generally, fine. But think of the cruelties large and small in government officials’ dominion over the lives of others.
Perhaps some will recognize in this video that governments are run by imperfect people just like businesses are. This is part of the reason why the promises that issue from Capitol Hill so often go unfulfilled while people acting on their own behalfs generally organize their affairs well.
State Secrets, Courts, and NSA’s Illegal Wiretapping
As Tim Lynch notes, Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled in favor of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation—unique among the many litigants who have tried to challenge the Bush-era program of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency because they actually had evidence, in the form of a document accidentally delivered to foundation lawyers by the government itself, that their personnel had been targeted for eavesdropping.
Other efforts to get a court to review the program’s legality had been caught in a kind of catch-22: Plaintiffs who merely feared that their calls might be subject to NSA filtering and interception lacked standing to sue, because they couldn’t show a specific, concrete injury resulting from the program.
But, of course, information about exactly who has been wiretapped is a closely guarded state secret. So closely guarded, in fact, that the Justice Department was able to force the return of the document that exposed the wiretapping of Al-Haramain, and then get it barred from the court’s consideration as a “secret” even after it had been disclosed. (Contrast, incidentally, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on individual privacy rights, which often denies any legitimate expectation of privacy in information once revealed to a third party.) Al-Haramain finally prevailed because they were ultimately able to assemble evidence from the public record showing they’d been wiretapped, and the government declined to produce anything resembling a warrant for that surveillance.
If you read over the actual opinion, however it may seem a little anticlimactic—as though something is missing. The ruling concludes that there’s prima facie evidence that Al-Haramain and their lawyers were wiretapped, that the government has failed to produce a warrant, and that this violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But of course, there was never any question about that. Not even the most strident apologists for the NSA program denied that it contravened FISA; rather, they offered a series of rationalizations for why the president was entitled to disregard a federal statute.
The Great Writ
The BBC has put together an interesting documentary on the writ of habeas corpus, a legal concept most people have heard of, but too few understand and appreciate. You can stream it here.
We should not forget that President Bush and the coterie of lawyers around him tried to advance a theory of executive power that would have made the writ of habeas corpus worthless. I hasten to add that President Obama has not really disavowed Bush’s claims and so the danger to the great writ has not passed just because Bush has left office.
Related video clip of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez here. Related Cato work here, here, and here.
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