Archive for August, 2010
The GOP and the “Ground Zero” Mosque
Some leaders within the Republican Party seem to have fixed on a useful club with which to bludgeon the president and his fellow Democrats — Cordoba House, aka the “Ground Zero” Mosque. Over the weekend, Republican strategist Ed Rollins explained how the party would use the issue in the coming months:
ROLLINS: Intellectually, the president may be right, but this is an emotional issue, and people who lost kids, brothers, sisters, fathers, what have you, do not want that mosque in New York, and it’s going to be a big, big issue for Democrats across this country.
“Face the Nation” Host Bob SCHIEFFER: So you see it as an issue that’s going to continue?
ROLLINS: Absolutely. No question about it. Every candidate — every candidate who’s in the challenge districts are going to be asked, how do you feel about building the mosque on the Ground Zero sites?
This strategy, exploiting still-raw emotion and implicitly demonizing Muslims, threatens to trade short-term political gain for medium-term political harm to the party. And it most certainly will translate into long-term harm for the country at large.
Opposing the construction of a mosque near the Ground Zero site plays into al Qaeda’s narrative that the United States is engaged in a war with Islam, that bin Laden and his tiny band of followers represent something more than a pitiful group of murderers and thugs, and that all American Muslims are an incipient Fifth Column that must be either converted to Christianity or driven out of the country, else they will undermine American society from within.
It isn’t a political slam-dunk, either. Though 64 percent of Americans think a mosque near Ground Zero is ”inappropriate“, 60 percent of all respondents in the same survey, including 57 percent of Republicans, believe that the organizers have a right to build in that location, and presumably would not favor a government prohibition on this activity. (h/t Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight) If anyone were to show evidence that the parties building the center were in any way linked to the 9/11 terrorists, or funded by or funding these same terrorists, then the issues at stake would change. But they haven’t done so, and are unlikely to do so. In the meantime, those GOP leaders who oppose the mosque betray a basic inability to discern public attitudes, even as they propel this country on a ruinous course, headlong into a civilizational war which pits all Americans against all Muslims.
Should Govt Regulate Executive Pay?
Every couple of weeks, the Economist conducts an on-line debate between two economists over a timely public policy issue. This week’s debate features yours truly, debating Professor Wayne Guay of the Wharton School. The question being debated: should government regulate the pay of corporate executives?
You probably won’t be surprised to learn I take the position that government should generally stay out of regulating executive pay (or any pay). To see my argument, just follow the link.
The Professional Left
As a former conservative (and a former leftist; I got around), I have noticed that the mainstream media often use the term “ultra-conservative” but rarely apply any equivalent term to extremists on the Left. (I use Left/leftist because I mean to reclaim the term “liberal” for libertarians.) Evidently, there are no left-wing extremists, only right-wing extremists.
But maybe President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs gave the mainstream media a term they can use: “the professional left.” Venting about these left-wing extremists in his own party, Gibbs said:
They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.
President Obama has repeatedly stated his preference for a single-payer health care system, such as they have in Canada. Does that make him a semi-professional leftist?
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
China Now World’s 2nd Largest Economy: Ho Hum
China is now officially the world’s second largest economy, overtaking Japan in the quarter that ended in June and likely for all of 2010. While the story has been widely reported (more than 1,500 articles on Google News this morning), it is less significant than it first appears.
The news will probably ruffle the feathers of the China hawks, who will see in it a threat to America’s influence in the world, but China’s rise to no. 2 is really another sign of the world returning to normal.
China is home, after all, to one-fifth of mankind. Its population of 1,330 million is more than 10 times that of Japan (127 million) and more than four times that of the United States (310 million), according to the CIA Factbook. So even though China’s gross domestic product is now larger than Japan’s, its GDP per capita is still only one tenth that of its east Asian neighbor.
If China sticks to its path of market liberalization, it’s close to inevitable that its GDP economy will eventually surpass that of the United States in overall size. That news event is likely to grab headlines in 15 to 20 years based on current rates of growth. Even then, China’s per capita GDP will only be a quarter of what we enjoy in the United States.
China’s rank as no. 1 will be nothing new in history. According to the late British economic historian Angus Maddison, China’s economy had been the largest in the world for most of the past two millennia. In his magisterial 2001 book The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Maddison estimated that as recently as 1820 China’s GDP was 30 percent larger than the economies of Western Europe and the United States combined (p. 117).
After centuries of war, civil strife, and self-imposed isolation, China is only now rightfully reclaiming its rank as one of the world’s largest economies. That development is nothing to be feared.
On the “Wisdom” of Obama
Obama Backpedals on Ground Zero Mosque
Politico Arena asks today for continued comment on Obama’s Ground Zero mosque “correction.”
My response
Well, well: What a difference a day makes. Yesterday [Saturday] most POLITICO Arena contributors – including law professors, shockingly – were falling over themselves to defend President Obama’s Friday night Ground Zero mosque remarks — on constitutional principle, no less — while a very few of us were cutting through that nonsense.
Meanwhile, the president and the White House were struggling to get the word out that constitutional principle wasn’t really the point at issue here. It was, rather, the “wisdom” of building a mosque so close to Ground Zero. Now that we’re clear about that, perhaps Arena contributors can focus on that issue, not the straw man they erected to skewer the constitutionally benighted they imagined afoot.
But there’s another issue here, too. On Friday night we saw, once again, the real Barack Obama, the Obama who disparages Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” the Obama who rushes to condemn Cambridge policemen who act “stupidly.” No White House spinmeister can take any of that back
Obama on the Ground Zero Mosque
Politico Arena asks for comments today on President Obama’s Ground Zero Mosque remarks:
My response:
Speaking expressly “as President” last evening [Friday], Mr. Obama has weighed in on the Ground Zero Islamic mosque controversy — and blatantly misstated it.
This controversy has nothing to do with Muslims having “the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country” or with their ”right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan,” as Obama put it. Nor does it have anything to do with the First Amendment. Rather, the issue is simply one of common decency and sensitivity to the feelings of others.
The president is right about one thing: Ground Zero is “hallowed ground.” It is the ground where some 3,000 people of all faiths lost their lives in a brutal attack by radical Muslims acting in the name of their religion, however distorted their beliefs may have been. Those who lost loved ones that day, to say nothing of the rest of us, cannot be indifferent to that fact — as those who support the mosque’s location near Ground Zero seem to be.
Why Should Politicians and Bureaucrats Decide Whether Breast-Cancer Patients Can Take Avastin?
Today’s Washington Post contains an article titled, “FDA Considers Revoking Approval of Avastin for Advanced Breast Cancer.” An excerpt:
The debate over Avastin, prescribed to about 17,500 women with breast cancer a year, has become entangled in the politically explosive struggle over medical spending and effectiveness that flared during the battle over health-care reform: How should the government balance protecting patients and controlling costs without restricting access to cutting-edge, and often costly, treatments?
A better question is: why should the government be the one to strike that balance? Why shouldn’t some women be able to sign up for a health plan that covers Avastin, while others are free to make a different choice?
“Government Motors”: NPR’s Gaffe?
NPR’s 9:00 a.m. newscast this morning included this accidentally accurate line:
Government, rather General Motors is expected to announce plans for an initial public offering of stock this week.
The comment can be heard here at about 3:10, but I assume the online hourly report is updated throughout the day.
For more on Government Motors, click here.
The Washington Post Misleads Readers about Medicare & Social Security Funding
Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I submitted to the editor of The Washington Post:
The Post’s economic reporters need to convey to readers that the Medicare and Social Security “trust funds” contain zero funds [“Medicare Funds to Last 12 Years Longer than Earlier Forecast, Report Says,” August 6].
This is not up for dispute. When those programs’ revenues exceed outlays, Congress puts the excess in general revenues and spends it. Congress marks the event by leaving an IOU to itself in these “trust funds.” Those IOUs are not “funds,” any more than an IOU that you write to yourself is money. These so-called “trust funds” therefore have no bearing on the (in)solvency of Medicare and Social Security.
Yet every year, the trustees for these programs claim that they do, making the Medicare and Social Security trustees reports an annual, ritualized lie that the U.S. government broadcasts to the American people.
Properly educating reporters, editors, and politicians about the Medicare and Social Security “trust funds” is a decades-long project.
Free Markets for Free Parking
I am disappointed that the distinguished George Mason University economist, Tyler Cowen, has fallen for the “high-cost-of-free-parking” arguments of UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup. Shoup is an excellent scholar, but like many scholars, he has the parochial view that the city that he lives in is a representative example of what is happening everywhere else.
Should free parking be a thing of the past?
Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not, and that without such requirements there would be less free parking. This last assumption is extremely unlikely, as entrepreneurs everywhere know that (outside of New York City) 90 percent of all urban travel is by car, and businesses that don’t offer parking are going to lose customers to ones that do.
Another Obamacare Lawsuit
As briefing continues in the Virginia and Florida (+ 19 other states) cases — next hearings will be in October and September, respectively – I wanted to highlight the filing of another serious lawsuit, which I’d mentioned previously in a roundup of legal action. Our friends at the Goldwater Institute have filed a challenge on behalf of a small-business owner, three congressmen (Reps. Jeff Flake, Trent Franks, and John Shadegg, all Republicans of Arizona), and 29 Arizona state legislators. This new lawsuit, known as Coons v. Geithner, argues that the federal health care bill exceeds Congress’s powers, violates individual rights, interferes with the authority of states, and violates the separation of powers by setting up a new bureaucracy without meaningful congressional oversight or judicial review. The legal team is led by experienced constitutional litigator Clint Bolick (whose excellent book David’s Hammer Cato published a few years ago). You can read the press release here, find out more about the lawsuit here, and download the complaint here.
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