Archive for May, 2010
A Warning Label — on the U.S. Constitution
Knowing of my interest in oddball warning labels, reader Clark S. alerts me to this $4.95 paperback copy of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Articles of Confederation, which contains the following advisory (readers may need to scroll to the “Copyright” section, depending on how the page displays)
© Wilder Publications 2008
This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.
A bit of Googling revealed that the same publisher slaps the same boilerplate language on other reprints including the Federalist Papers and The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc. Do they perhaps put it on all works composed before a certain cut-off date? Wilder Publications is described here as in the business of “publishing print-on-demand books (mostly self-help and public domain reprints).”
I am happy to report that the Cato Institute’s excellent pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution daringly omits any warning and lets readers take the Constitution straight up.
How the Debt Crisis Will Stop
The economist Herb Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” That’s a good riposte when people wring their hands over something unsustainable. Of course, that fact doesn’t tell you how unsustainable situations will stop, and some ways are less pleasant than others.
I thought of “Stein’s Law” when I read former California Assembly speaker Willie Brown’s response to a question about whether California’s lavish public-employee pensions would bankrupt the state:
No, it’s not going to bankrupt the state. My guess is that the State of California, like most places involved with pensions, is going to cease to pay them.
Cato Pledge Drive
Public radio talk show host Diane Rehm said during WAMU’s pledge drive yesterday:
“Whenever I meet someone who says, ‘Diane, I love your show, I love what you do,’ the first thing I ask them is, ‘Are you a member?’”
“Member” means financial contributor, of course, and she went on to make the point that if you value public radio, you should contribute. Of course, every taxpayer is a contributor to public radio, whether he values it or not.
But that’s not true for the Cato Institute. We don’t accept government money. Indeed, a few years ago, we rejected a large contribution from Fannie Mae when that entity announced that it was going to add Cato to the vast list of Washington organizations and politicians on whom it showered its ill-gotten gains. We also, as it happens, got only 2 percent of our funding from corporations last year. The money that enables Cato to do its work comes overwhelmingly from 15,000 individual contributors.
So Diane Rehm’s question is much more valid in our case: Do you visit the Cato website or enjoy seeing our scholars on television and in the newspapers? Do you value the work we do on behalf of liberty and limited government? Are you a Sponsor? If not, shouldn’t you become a Sponsor and help make sure we can continue and expand that work?
And if you are a Sponsor, thank you!
Mark Penn Mourns the Plight of Libertarian Voters
Mark Penn, who has been a pollster and consultant to the presidential campaigns of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Anderson, and Ross Perot, writes about political discontent in Britain and the United States in the Washington Post today, noting that in this country
socially liberal and fiscally conservative voters believe, especially after what happened with health care, that they have no clear choice: They must sign on with the religious right or the economic left.
Exactly the point that David Kirby and I have been making in our studies on the libertarian vote, as in the first line of this January study:
Libertarian — or fiscally conservative, socially liberal — voters are often torn between their aversions to the Republicans’ social conservatism and the Democrats’ fiscal irresponsibility.
Libertarian-leaning voters are a large swing vote, and they do indeed find problems with both parties. As parties increasingly cater to their “base,” libertarian-leaning independents find themselves dissatisfied with both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. We noted in our first study, “The Libertarian Vote,” that according to the 2004 exit polls, “28 million Bush voters support[ed] either marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples” and “17 million Kerry voters . . . thought government should not . . . ‘do more to solve problems.’” That was 45 million voters who didn’t seem to fit neatly into the red-blue, liberal-conservative dichotomy.
But Penn is on less solid ground in his next line:
It is just a matter of time before they demand their own movement or party.
Movement, maybe. The Ron Paul campaign certainly appealed to antiwar, small-government voters. And the Tea Party movement focuses almost exclusively on economic and constitutional issues, making it more appealing to libertarians than typical conservative organizations. Meanwhile, as the Tea Party opposition to the Democrats’ big-government opposition surges, so does progress toward marriage equality and rational drug reform. Maybe those various libertarian-leaning groups will find each other. But a new party is a much bigger challenge. It’s no accident that the only third party that achieved even modest success in recent history was headed a billionaire who was also a celebrity, Ross Perot. Ballot access laws, campaign finance restrictions, exclusion of third-party candidates from debates and media coverage, single-member districts — all make it difficult to start a successful third party. It may also be the case that moderates, who tend not to be very angry, and libertarians, who don’t really much like politics, are particularly ill suited to undertake the massive amount of work that a new party requires.
But Penn is absolutely right to point to the plight of “socially liberal and fiscally conservative voters,” forced in every election to ”sign on with the religious right or the economic left.”
Want a Free Vacation? Move to Europe
I recently returned from a short vacation — had to get it in before the Supreme Court begins announcing decisions in this year’s big cases and the president nominates a replacement for Justice Stevens — but it seems that I’m a chump for paying for it myself. While I was gone, the EU’s commissioner for enterprise and industry, one Antonio Tajani, declared that vacationing is a human right, one that ought to be paid for by the taxpayers:
Tajani, who unveiled his plan last week at a ministerial conference in Madrid, believes the days when holidays were a luxury have gone. “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life,” he said.
Tajani, who used to be transport commissioner, said he had been able to “affirm the rights of passengers” in his previous office and the next step was to ensure people’s “right to be tourists”.
As Dave Barry would say, I’m not making this up:
Tajani’s programme will be piloted until 2013 and then put into full operation. It will be open to pensioners and anyone over 65, young people between 18 and 25, families facing “difficult social, financial or personal” circumstances and disabled people. The disabled and the elderly can be accompanied by one person.
In the initial phase, northern Europeans will be encouraged to visit southern Europe and vice versa. Details of how participants are chosen have not yet been finalised, but it is expected the EU will subsidise about 30% of the cost.
Officials have envisaged sending south Europeans to Manchester and Liverpool on a tour of “archeological and industrial sites” such as closed factories and power plants.
With apologies to friends who are fans of the Man U and Liverpool soccer teams, I’m not sure those cities would be on my list of top 1000 places to visit. But still this program illustrates the logical culmination — one logical culmination – of a view that government exists to provide all things to all people and that everyone has a “right” to whatever makes life good and pleasant and fulfilling.
Libertarians are often assailed for exaggerating the problems inherent in large, unlimited government, or of making ad abusurdum slippery slope arguments, or of having “outdated” views of political theory. But really, when the “right” to a paid vacation is ensconced in so many countries’ laws, when it gets its own article (24) in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is it that far-fetched for someone to come up with an actual state-provided vacation? Apparently Spain has already been doing it.
Behind Every Law Is Force
That’s one lesson that this video of a drug raid should drive home.
Warning: Graphic Language and Material
In America today, lawmaking is discussed much too casually. The consequences are not seriously considered. We allow agencies to issue regulations without having a formal vote in the legislature. “Too cumbersome.” Compliance is automatically assumed. Few want to consider whether the use of brute force can be justified against someone who resists, or the danger that might be created for the innocent who get swept up in investigations. We now have thousands of rules and regulations on the books.
We suffered through the painful lessons of liquor prohibition, but have been slow to see the parallels in the drug war. A few years ago, Cato published a report on these paramilitary raids, called Overkill. The author of that study, Radley Balko, has been vigilant about highlighting these raids and dispelling the idea that they are just a few “isolated incidents.”
More on the drug war here.
The FTC and Those GM Ads
I’m usually in enthusiastic accord with our friends over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but it seems to me they’ve made a mistake by petitioning the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on GM’s ridiculous “we repaid our federal loan” ad. Some zealous enforcers would love for the FTC to do more to regulate speech by American business on matters of public concern, and it seems to me the last thing we should do is encourage such a trend.
For those who came in late, General Motors and its CEO Ed Whitmire were widely and rightly assailed here and elsewhere for asserting (in a column whose message was repeated in much-played TV ads) that the company had repaid its bailout loan “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule.” Actually, as the inspector general of the government’s TARP program readily acknowledged, the firm had merely used one pot of federal money to repay another. Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley helped expose the dodge, and publications ranging from FoxNews.com to the New York Times joined in with scathing coverage.
Yesterday CEI announced that it had filed a formal complaint [PDF] with the FTC urging the commission to investigate the automaker’s ad campaign as misleading. It alleges that the ad campaign “could unfairly dupe consumers into a false, renewed confidence in the company” and that “consumer purchasing decisions can easily be affected by such considerations.” Nick Gillespie at Reason, CEI general counsel Hans Bader, and Todd Zywicki at Volokh have more.
There’s a long history of businesses’ responding to public criticism of their operations or products — and getting in further legal or regulatory trouble because of that very response. In one early case, the FTC went after egg producers for asserting, in the midst of a cholesterol scare that in hindsight appears overblown, that their ovoid wares were not in fact a menace to cardiac health. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence have asked the FTC to prohibit ads that imply that keeping a loaded weapon on hand will make a family safer. In Nike v. Kasky, a famous case that reached the Supreme Court [Thomas Goldstein, Cato Supreme Court Review 2003, PDF], shoemaker Nike was sued under a California law over the public defense it had put forward of its labor practices in overseas factories. Environmentalists have sought to suppress ads claiming that nuclear power is nonpolluting, and so forth.
Free-market advocates have generally argued that whatever the merits of laws or regulations banning misleading advertising in garden-variety commercial contexts, there are special dangers to the First Amendment and to robust debate generally in letting agencies and courts second-guess the content of “issue ads” and speech on topics of public controversy. To begin with, it encourages advocates to turn to the law to silence disagreeable speech rather than muster their best arguments to rebut it. In one grotesque example, MoveOn.org and Common Cause actually petitioned the FTC to institute a complaint against Fox News over its use of the slogan “Fair and Balanced”, since (they said) the network was neither.
Despite its current dependence on government, GM is in every relevant legal sense a private company, so any precedents forged against it will wind up applying to every other private enterprise that might wish to advertise on matters of public controversy. Which makes it a concern that CEI’s complaint cites with seeming enthusiasm broad FTC interpretations of authority — for example, its authority to suppress speech that might not be in itself false but could leave a potentially misleading impression.
If there is a continuum extending from more or less purely commercial speech (“Our tires last 40,000 miles”) to more or less purely political speech (“Our business is badly overtaxed”), GM’s ad campaign surely falls way over toward the “political” side. CEI’s response to this is to argue that the campaign might influence consumers’ purely economic calculations (as opposed to the political reasons they have to feel angry at GM) by making them more likely to see the company as solvent and thus as capable of making good its warranty promises. The words “strained” and “makeweight” come to mind to describe this argument. Does CEI really want to establish the future principle that a company’s over-sunny talk about its financial prospects will henceforth get it in trouble with two federal agencies, the FTC and SEC, rather than the SEC alone?
It all seems a rather high price to pay in principle for keeping the GM-TARP story in the papers for another day or two.
Should We Break Up the Banks?
When it comes to banking policy, there are few people I respect more than Jonathan Macey and Arnold Kling; so when these two, independently, argue that we should be breaking up the largest banks, it is idea that merits consideration. Yet I still have my doubts.
First, lets start with what we are fairly certain of. There is a large empirical literature that suggest most US mega-banks are beyond their efficient size. There is a good survey of the literature by former Fed Economist Allen Berger . So, at a minimum, the academic literature suggests the largest banks are beyond a size that is justified by the social benefits.
However, there is also a small literature that suggests more concentrated banking systems are more stable, and less prone to crisis. Some of this literature has grown out of research efforts by the World Bank. While this literature is largely cross-country comparisons, recalling our own banking history gives several examples - the savings & loan crisis, the mass of small banks failures in the 1920s and 1930s, and current day Georgia – where lots of small bank failures have been associated with significant economic damage. So, at minimum, there is some question of whether breaking up the largest banks would give us a more stable, less crisis-prone system. In fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest that breaking up the banks would make our financial system more fragile.
To some extent, the debate over breaking up the large banks is about reducing political power. The argument is that, because of their vast resources, these large banks unduly influence and capture our political system. Undoubtedly, I believe the largest banks have substantial influence over both our legislative and regulatory systems. However, so do smaller banks. From my seven years as staff on the Senate Banking Committee, I would definitely argue that the Independent Community Banks Association (ICBA), as a group, has far more pull than does say Bank of America, as a single company. One need only witness the various exemptions for small banks in the Dodd bill, for instance from the consumer protection bureau, to illustrate the lobbying power of small bankers. One could also argue that the economic history of progressive era legislation, like the Sherman Act, is one of smaller, organized interests winning against larger sized firms. Despite its appeal, the assertion that bigger is always better in politics is just an assertion. Yet this is at heart an empirical argument, and perhaps one that can be tested. Until then, I still have my doubts.
Contra Camelot
My DC Examiner column this week looks at the controversy surrounding the History Channel’s forthcoming miniseries, “The Kennedys,” starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes as JFK and Jackie. It’s controversial in large part because the producer is “24″‘s Joel Surnow, who is cigar-buddies with Rush Limbaugh and an outspoken conservative:
The screenwriter, Stephen Kronish, insists that he’s “not out to destroy the sacred cow” of the JFK presidency. Too bad: In an age when Americans still periodically swoon for imperial presidents, a little sacred-cow tipping would be a public service.
Robert Greenwald, a left-wing documentarian who read an early version of the script, is leading the fight to discredit the project. Greenwald seems especially troubled by the (largely true) allegations about Kennedy’s Tiger-Woodsish sex life. But I argue that:
More troubling were Kennedy’s routine abuses of power. His attorney general, brother Bobby, ordered wiretaps on New York Times and Newsweek reporters, along with various congressmen and steel executives who’d had the nerve to raise prices. At JFK’s instigation in 1961, the Internal Revenue Service set up a “strike force” aimed at groups opposing the administration. Nixon’s defenders had half a point when they complained that the sainted Jack had gotten away with the sort of abuses that brought Nixon’s own downfall.
Worse still is how the persistent longing for Camelot has distorted Americans’ views of the presidency’s proper role:
Kennedy’s charm and vigor, and the tragic circumstances of his death, have made it hard to see the man clearly. A 1968 study on “juvenile idealization of the president” quoted a Houston mother: “When my little girl came out of school she told me someone killed the president, and her thoughts were — since the president was dead, where would we get our food and clothes from?” But “juvenile idealization” isn’t limited to juveniles.
Presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns, a Kennedy fan, wrote that “the stronger we make the Presidency, the more we strengthen democratic procedures.” Even today, far too many pundits and historians seem to get a Chris Matthews-style “thrill up [their] leg” when they contemplate “heroic” presidential activism.
Conservatives aren’t immune to presidential cultishness, of course.
Peggy Noonan called Bush’s post-9/11 address to Congress “a God-touched moment and a God-touched speech.” Fred Barnes wrote that “the stage was set for Bush to be God’s agent of wrath.” National Review Online ran ads for the Bush “Top Gun” action figure, and an article about how wonderful it was to have a presidential superhero to complement your GI Joe collection.
And even the What Would Reagan Do? stuff smacks of the “man on horseback” dream of the presidency that’s caused us so many problems. In fact, Surnow, “the Kennedys” producer, seems to have an unhealthy case of Gipper-worship himself. He told the New Yorker:
“I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed… . He made me feel good that I was in his family.”
If more people felt embarrassed to talk about presidents that way, we’d be well on our way to putting the presidency back in its proper constitutional place.
‘The Dumbest Terrorist In the World’?
Businessweek has a story quoting a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Michael Wildes, speculating that Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, made so many mistakes (leaving his house keys in the car, not knowing about the vehicle identification number, making calls from his cellphone, getting filmed, buying the car himself) that he may be the “dumbest terrorist in the world.” But Wildes can’t accept the idea that an al Qaeda type terrorist would be so incompetent and suggests that Shahzad was “purposefully hapless” to generate intelligence about the police reaction for the edification of his buddies back in Pakistan.
Give me a break. This incompetence is hardly unprecedented. Three years ago Bruce Schneier wrote an article titled “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot,” describing the incompetence of several would-be al Qaeda plots in the United States and castigating commentators for clinging to image of these guys as Bond-style villains that rarely err. It’s been six or seven years since people, including me, started pointing out that al Qaeda was wildly overrated. Back then, most people used to say that the reason al Qaeda hadn’t managed a major attack here since September 11 was because they were biding their time and wouldn’t settle for conventional bombings after that success. We are always explaining away our enemies’ failure.
The point here is not that all terrorists are incompetent — no one would call Mohammed Atta that — or that we have nothing to worry about. Even if all terrorists were amateurs like Shahzad, vulnerability to terrorism is inescapable. There are too many propane tanks, cars, and would-be terrorists to be perfectly safe from this sort of attack. The same goes for Fort Hood.
The point is that we are fortunate to have such weak enemies. We are told to expect nuclear weapons attacks, but we get faulty car bombs. We should acknowledge that our enemies, while vicious, are scattered and weak. If we paint them as the globe-trotting super-villains that they dream of being, we give them power to terrorize us that they otherwise lack. As I must have said a thousand times now, they are called terrorists for a reason. They kill as a means to frighten us into giving them something.
How the World of Campaign Finance Is Changing
Journalists are looking closely at the DISCLOSE bill, Congress’ response to Citizens United. CQ says DISCLOSE will loosen independent spending by the parties on their candidates.
Why is Congress liberalizing party spending? CQ explains:
According to one GOP attorney, opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision are realizing that they will have a difficult time challenging the constitutional right of outside groups to spend money, so this bill is a response to free up the parties to compete.
Mark that. Citizens United has altered the incentives regarding speech. In the past, Congress tried to suppress speech to win elections. Now leaders must liberalize in order to compete for votes.
Citizen Shahzad
Two smart guys on opposite sides of the political spectrum have sound points about the treatment of suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. First, Orin Kerr points out that investigators have some flexibility in determining when and whether to read Miranda rights. In this case, they refrained initially and questioned Shahzad for a while under the public safety exception. And despite the apparent belief of the perpetually terrorized that Miranda warnings are some kind of magical incantation that causes the cone of silence to descend upon blabbermouths, they determined that he would probably continue cooperating even after being Mirandized. But as Kerr points out, they could have proceeded sans Miranda had that seemed necessary—provided they were willing to waive the ability to introduce Shahzad’s confession at trial. Given that there appears to be plenty of other evidence against him, that might well have been a viable option.
Either way, this surely seems like the kind of judgment call best left to the investigators on the scene, not Monday morning quarterbacks in Congress like Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who gave us this priceless reaction:
“Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still,” King said.
Putting aside that nauseating “but still,” does King really imagine that he possesses some deep insight into the pernicious effect of Miranda warnings that the agents on the ground lacked? Again, Shahzad is apparently still cooperating—maybe they knew what they were doing.
From Steve Benen, meanwhile, we have one of many posts around the blogosphere pointing out the incoherence of a cowardly proposal mooted by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that would revoke the citizenship of Americans who join foreign terror groups. The blindingly obvious question: By what process do we determine that a suspected member of a foreign terror group is really a member of a foreign terror group? As Glenn Greenwald writes, there’s not much point to having a Bill of Rights if the government gets to revoke those rights at its whim. But no, Lieberman wants to assure us that suspects would have a right to challenge the revocation of their citizenship in a court—a civilian court, one hopes. Except giving material support to a foreign terror groups is, in fact, a crime. If there’s enough evidence to persuade a court of law that someone is a member of such a group—congratulations, there’s enough evidence to convict them in the civilian system as well! It’s heartening that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of support for this odious proposal, but depressing that a sitting senator would treat the rights of citizenship so lightly for the sake of a vapid, strutting display of “toughness.”
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