Archive for May, 2010
A Forceful Call For Change From El Paso
El Paso, TX is one of the safest cities in the country, but its residents are strongly identified with the human tragedy affecting their Mexican neighbors across the Rio Grande. El Paso shares a metropolitan area with Ciudad Juárez, México, arguably one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where over 4,000 people have been killed in the last couple of years.
This situation is something that the communities of El Paso and Las Cruces, NM want to change. On Monday, politicians, academics, civic and business leaders of both cities will hold an event calling for a “comprehensive revamping of the failed War on Drugs waged by the United States and other countries.” You can read the press release here.
Among other things, they
…advocate, as an important first step in drug reform, the repeal of the ineffective U.S. marijuana drug laws in favor of regulating, controlling and taxing the production, distribution, sale and consumption of marijuana by adults. The sale of marijuana in the U.S. black market contributes 50 to 70 percent of Mexico’s cartel revenues.
Last year the city council of El Paso passed a resolution calling for “an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.” Leading figures in the community have come to understand that the only way to tackle drug violence is by legalizing drugs, not by relying on conventional and unrealistic approaches, including tougher enforcement and sealing the border — alternatives that don’t resonate with a community so deeply intertwined with their Mexican neighbors.
As they meet at the White House on Monday, will President Obama and President Felipe Calderón of México hear the call for a change in drug policy coming from El Paso and Las Cruces?
Krugman and Libertarianism and Political Power
Paul Krugman has a post today titled “Why Libertarianism Doesn’t Work, Part N.” Maybe parts A-M were compelling, but it seems like there’s a big flaw in his logic today. Here’s the entire item:
Thinking about BP and the Gulf: in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.
Interviewer: So tort law takes care of a lot of this ..
Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.
And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.
Well, he’s got a point. Politicians do interfere in the tort system — by placing caps on liability, by stripping defendants of traditional legal defenses, and in other ways. As my colleague Aaron Powell notes, the problem here is that politicians have power that libertarians wouldn’t grant them. And:
Second, and more troubling for Krugman, is his admission that all politicians are corruptible. If that’s true (and it almost certainly is), then what does it say about Krugman’s constant calls for granting those same corruptible folks more power over our lives? Surely if Murkowski is corrupt enough to protect BP from tort damages, she’s corrupt enough to rig safety regulations in BP’s favor.
The libertarian system of markets and property rights is impeded when politicians interfere in it. But Krugman’s ideal system is that politicians should decide all questions — monetary policy, health care policy, product safety, environmental tradeoffs, you name it. Whose system is more likely to produce corrupt politicians, and more likely to fail because of them?
Federal Redesign of Hot Dogs?
From a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial, the sort of passage you think at first must be satire:
At the instigation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, federal bureaucrats at the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are studying whether to require the nation’s hot-dog makers to redesign hot dogs to reduce the likelihood of choking.
But it’s not satire, as other news clips confirm.
Now, as every parent knows who makes sure to cut up a hot dog for the smallest eaters, the risk of choking on one of these food objects is not zero (though it is very, very low; 13 children’s deaths in 2006 were linked to hot-dog asphyxiation, but children eat nearly 2 billion hot dogs a year). In that sense, the proposal is less obviously batty than some other federal regulatory initiatives that have upended whole sectors of commerce over risks that have never been shown to have harmed anyone at all.
But notice that the only truly effective way to keep the familiar cylindrical hot dog off the plates of small children would be to ban it for everyone — the logical end point, perhaps, of a policy that infantilizes parents by assuming they cannot be trusted to watch out for their children’s safety. If on some future Memorial Day you find only squared-off frankfurters or triangular-prism bratwursts in the supermarket cooler, don’t say you weren’t warned.
Associated Press: Drug War Failing
From an Associated Press story:
After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread. Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked. “In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press.”
Former Drug Czar John Walters complains, ”To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven’t made any difference is … saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It’s saying all these people’s work is misguided.”
Precisely.
Read the whole thing. More here and here.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications is a microcosm of government waste.
- The giant postal monopoly of today bears little resemblance to the limited postal service of history. And that’s not because horses have been replaced with little white trucks.
- Should the government promote fishing? Perhaps if you believe in the nanny state.
- Thus far with the House Republican “YouCut” website, we have the Empire State Building engulfed in flames and the GOP sending in a toddler with a squirt gun to solve the problem.
‘YouCut’ Spending by 0.017%
House Republicans unveiled a bold strategy to cut 0.017 percent from the $3.7 trillion federal budget this week. Republican Whip Eric Cantor unveiled the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which includes five possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. Mr. Cantor promised to take the favored cut to the House floor next week for members to consider.
The basic idea of YouCut is a good one — getting citizens actively involved in solving the government’s giant deficit problem and focusing congressional attention on cutting the bloated budget.
But the GOP leadership make themselves look silly by offering such small cuts. The suggested cuts on the new website average just $638 million in annual savings, which is just 0.017 percent of total federal spending. Put another way, it is just $1 of cuts for every $5,800 of federal spending. The average YouCut savings idea is just 0.04 percent of this year’s federal deficit of $1.6 trillion. So we would need 2,500 cuts of this size to balance the budget.
It’s a mystery why the Republican leadership can’t offer more than tiny spending reforms. They’ve got lots of sharp staffers who know how wasteful many large programs are and understand the need to terminate whole agencies. It’s true that YouCut will offer new cuts every week, but so far the cuts are very timid.
The second-largest YouCut idea this week is to refocus “community development” spending on those cities that are the most needy. But the whole idea of the federal government spending money on local projects such as parking lots is both economically absurd and an obvious violation of the Tenth Amendment.
Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal?
Decrying political polarization and “the ideological purification of both parties,” the Washington Post notes in an editorial:
The world is complicated, and an electorate so diverse in geography, race, class and beliefs can’t be shoehorned into two fixed templates. There is no particular reason why all advocates of fiscal restraint should also oppose abortion rights, or why supporters of a progressive tax code should necessarily favor restrictions on gun ownership.
Indeed. That’s a point we’ve been making since 1981, when we published “An Alternative Analysis of Mass Belief Systems: Liberal, Conservative, Populist, and Libertarian” by Stuart A. Lilie and William S. Maddox. And especially in our studies on the “libertarian vote,” in which we make the point that there are millions of voters who don’t line up neatly into red-blue, liberal-conservative columns.
Obama Administration Doesn’t Walk the Ed Reform Walk
Oh, they’ll chew your ears off about how boldly they support and are catalyzing real education reform, and how they won’t accept the failed status quo. Yes sir, they’ll boast nonstop about what a gigantic success their Race to the Top initiative has been, despite having no real evidence to back that up. Without question, the Obama administration will talk the talk about transformative education reform. But walk the walk? That’s another story.
Let’s put this in perspective. Almost the entire basis for the Obama administration’s claim to school reform supremacy is Race to the Top. And what does RTTT do? It furnishes $4.35 billion to entice states into submitting sort of bold-sounding plans for education reform while requiring them to do very little when it comes to implementing those plans. At the very least, we have little reason to believe the administration can or will hold states to their promised reforms. And by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s own admission, the only winners to date won by getting lots of union and school district buy-in for their proposed reforms. So, as far as we can tell, Race to the Top itself is way more hot air than fiery reform.
But that isn’t even close to the clearest evidence that the Obama administration does little more than flap its gums about real reform while substantively supporting something very different. The clearest sign is that the so-called “stimulus” from which RTTT funding came furnished about $100 billion for education, and the vast majority of that was intended to keep as many people employed in our incredibly inefficient, labor-dominated public schooling monopoly as possible. In other words, the “stimulus” provided a gargantuan payoff for the very people who are supposed to be the subjects of tough reforms, while furnishing a relatively tiny sum for the program supposedly intended to inspire such reforms. (Of course, the Obama administration also helped kill the proven-effective D.C. school choice program, but we’ll save that for another time.)
And the hits just keep on coming. With school districts nearing the end of their stimulus windfall, they once again face having to cut some of their copious fat. But Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has put forth the $23 billion, “Keep Our Educators Working Act” to keep that from happening, and yesterday the administration — suprise, surprise — threw its support behind the bill.
Even the Washington Post has come out against the legislation, which if nothing else would add another $23 billion to our absolutely collosal federal deficit. Moreover, to borrow a favorite phrase of the President’s, let me be clear: an honest accounting of even the biggest potential staffing cuts shows that those losses would constitute a relatively small cut from a system that has for decades added staff at a furious pace without producing any better outcomes.
Unfortunately, neither the shamefully irresponsible mortgaging of our future, nor the clear need to eliminate costly public-schooling jobs, seems to matter to this administration. As long as people keep letting them get away with nothing but reform-y talk, it appears they’ll willingly bankrupt the country to keep the status quo fat and happy.
DHS to States: Pleeease Spend This Money!
Here’s a window onto the upside-down way government spending works. The Department of Homeland Security has sent a letter to states begging them to spend federally provided money on implementing REAL ID, the national ID law.
“DHS is regularly asked by members of Congress, as well as the Office of Management and Budget, if these funds are needed by the states, and whether these funds should be reallocated to other efforts,” writes Juliette Kayyam of DHS’ Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. “As both the states and the Federal government face increasingly tough budgeting decisions, it is more important than ever that these available funds be utilized.”
That’s right: Tough budget times make it imperative to spend more money.
States don’t want to implement REAL ID, and the American people don’t want a national ID, but the DHS bureaucracy is rattling cages to try to get money spent purely for the sake of spending. It’s flabbergasting.
NFIB: ObamaCare Is Unconstitutional, ‘Threatens Individual Freedom’
The National Federation of Independent Business — the nation’s largest small-business lobby — will join the lawsuit that 20 attorneys general (including one Democrat) have brought against ObamaCare.
According to the Associated Press, NFIB found ObamaCare’s individual mandate particularly offensive:
The National Federation of Independent Business will join the argument that Americans cannot be required under the Constitution to obtain insurance coverage, the group’s president, Dan Danner, said in an interview…
The new law allows government “to regulate you just because you exist,” said Danner. “If you can regulate this, where do you stop? Do you tell people, ‘We are going to mandate that everybody exercise?’ We think this is an overreach by the government. It goes too far, and threatens individual freedom.” [Emphasis mine.]
Repeal the bill.
The Desperate Left
Today Politico Arena asks:
Are tea partiers the new John Birchers?
This is absurd. An obscure assistant professor teaching in a middling university writes an opinion piece comparing the Tea Party movement to the John Birch Society — indeed, even to the Ku Klux Klan — and Politico Arena asks us to take it seriously for comment?! Res ipsa loquitur: The several recent elections speak more loudly than this professor ever will. Back to adult fare.
Immigration II: On the Substance of the Matter
Responding to my immigration post this morning, my colleagues Dan Griswold and Jason Kuznicki have focused on the single short paragraph that touched on the substance of the matter. (The question before me, posed by Politico Arena, concerned mainly the political implications of the new Arizona law, given the latest Pew Research Center poll on the issue.) I quite agree with both that we’ve never had full control of our southern border (or any border, for that matter), but as Dan has noted elsewhere, when we had a guest-worker program in place, illegal immigration dropped by 95 percent – no small drop. And illegal, not legal, immigration is the issue before us. And Dan is right too that we’ve thrown a lot of enforcement at the problem in recent years, to limited avail, so it’s not true that Congress hasn’t done anything. What it has done, however, hasn’t addressed the real problem, the underlying substantive law, as Dan has often written.
I’m struck, though, by Jason’s unqualified comment that he can’t say he shares my views on immigration.” Really? I did say, I believe, that Congress needs to address the problem, including with a guest-worker program. And I also said that “It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders.” I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that.
Concerning both the welfare state and terrorism, Jason points to “remedies” at the far end of the problem. He writes, for example, that our welfare state is going broke anyway, and “compared to the damage being done by native-born U.S. citizens and their cursedly long lifespans, the immigrants’ overall effects are quite small.” (I won’t take that “cursedly long lifespan” point personally.) True, but in places where the welfare state issues are concentrated, like border-state emergency rooms and schools, that long-term national perspective isn’t the issue. Yes, getting the government out of health care and education might ameliorate those localized problems (that question’s for another day), but we can’t always wait for more remote problems to be solved before we address more immediate ones.
And that goes for Jason’s terrorism point, too. He writes: “Without the black market in drugs, we’d have a lot less to fear from terrorists, particularly on our southern border.” I’m all for legalizing recreational drugs. But I was alluding to Islamic terrorists, not narco-terrorists, when I spoke of getting control of our borders. Legalizing drugs (again, a more remote remedy) might have some effect on the coffers of Islamic terrorists, but it would hardly solve the terrorism problem. As long as that problem exists, we need border control. Let’s remember, for example, that it was an alert border agent who thwarted the would-be LAX bomber.
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