Archive for October, 2010
Congratulations, Mario Vargas Llosa
On behalf of all of my colleagues at the Cato Institute, I warmly congratulate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa for having won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Mario has distinguished himself not only as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but also as Latin America’s most well-known classical liberal—a champion of democratic capitalism who has never been afraid of speaking truth to power. His essays and tireless activism have educated millions of people in Latin America and inspired new generations to cherish and cultivate a culture of liberty. His vision of a modern Latin America has also informed Cato’s work in the region and beyond. We are honored and grateful that Mario has long been a generous friend of Cato’s and look forward to continuing that friendship in pursuit of advancing the liberal principles we share.
Snyder v. Phelps: The Constitution Protects ‘Outrageous’ Speech Too
I’ve resisted commenting on Snyder v. Phelps, the “funeral protest case,” because, as the old saying goes, hard cases make bad law. And in this instance, really weird and repugnant speech makes for a lot of sound and fury signifying very little.
Still, the bizarre and inflammatory facts of the case — protestors show up at soldiers’ funerals to make the point that these deaths are God’s retribution for America’s tolerance of homosexuality — have gained plenty of media interest, particularly during this relatively uneventful term at the Supreme Court. So I have commented a few times on the radio and yesterday attended the oral argument, the transcript of which you can read here and audio for which should be released on the Court’s website tomorrow.
At the end of the day, this case implicates all sorts of legal issues but the First Amendment is almost tangential to it. A private cemetery can and should remove unwanted visitors for trespassing — but the Phelpses didn’t enter the cemetery. A town can pass ordinances restricting the time, place, and manner of protests — but the Phelpses stayed within all applicable regulations and followed police instructions. Violent or aggressive protestors can be both prosecuted and sued for assault, harassment, and the like — but the Phelpses’ protests are neither loud nor involve “getting up in the grill” of people, as their lawyer (and church member) put it during oral argument. In short, there’s very little to this case and the Phelpses’ actions, ugly and objectionable as they are, are as constitutionally protected as a neo-Nazi parade. If people don’t like that, they can change state laws to put certain further restrictions on protests near funerals or other sensitive areas — or federal laws in the case of military cemeteries—but they shouldn’t be able to sue simply for being offended. Eugene Volokh has a more detailed analysis in the Wall Street Journal.
Oh, and as for predicting how the Court will rule, I’ll say 8-1 for the Phelpses in a narrow opinion, with Justice Alito dissenting (as he did last year in United States v. Stevens, the “depictions of animal cruelty” case).
While You Were Watching the Race to the Top…
…President Obama and Congress were doling out tens-of-billions of dollars to the education status quo while doing little of meaningful, reform-y substance. Now we see the payoff: President Obama has gotten bipartisan accolades for supposedly being a different kind of Democrat on education — one willing to take on teacher unions – while he’s fully kept union allegiances.
Reports the Washington Post about National Education Association plans to spend $15 million on largely Dem-friendly, midterm-election advertisements:
Karen M. White, the NEA’s political director, said the 3.2 million-member union is in sync with Obama more often than not. As an example, she pointed to his support for a $10 billion education funding bill that the Democratic-led Congress passed in August over Republican opposition.
“That education jobs bill got so many of our members engaged,” White said. “It was a turning point for us.”
She played down controversy over Obama’s school reform agenda as “bumps in the road,” adding, “we share the same goals as this administration.”
It really wasn’t hard to see the politics at play here: Talk a lot about reform, expend riches to protect the status quo, win good will from all sides. And heck, who gets hurt? Only taxpayers and students, that’s all.
Canada’s Spending Cuts and Economic Growth
We’ve had huge federal deficit spending in recent years–$459 billion in FY2008, $1.4 trillion in FY2009, $1.5 trillion in FY2010, and now an estimated $1.4 trillion in FY2011. Despite all the spending, the economy is still sluggish, private investment remains in the tank, and the unemployment rate is stuck at near 10 percent.
The Bush/Obama Keynesian spending experiment has obviously failed. Yet eminent economists Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein think that the government hasn’t spent enough. They argue that a war-sized package of fresh spending is what the doctor orders for our sick economy.
If big government spending really did spur economic growth, then the Canadian economy would be flat on its back and dying. But the Canadian economy boomed during the 1990s and 2000s as government spending was dramatically reduced.
In the early 1990s, overspending had pushed the size of the Canadian government to 53 percent of GDP, and government debt was spiralling upward. But the nation turned course and began cutting spending and making pro-market reforms such as privatization and tax rate cuts. The chart shows that Canadian government spending was chopped by more than 10 percent of GDP. (Data from Table 25).
As spending was cut, the Canadian economy boomed. Average annual growth matched U.S. growth from the mid-1990s until the recent recession (See Table 1). Canada made a mistake in passing a spending stimulus last year, which pushed up spending temporarily, but government spending is expected to fall again and the economy has already returned to solid growth.
U.S. policymakers would be advised to ignore the Keynesian theoreticians who seem intent on bankrupting the nation. Instead they should take lessons from the success of the Canadian model of spending cuts, balanced budgets, debt reduction, open international trading and investment, sound banking, privatization, and corporate tax rate cuts.
Enough Community College PDA
Yesterday, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Community Colleges, and in-your-face love was in the air. President Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden, a community college professor, couldn’t keep their hands off their signficant other, lavishing all sorts of praise on their favorite little schools.
Swooned Dr. Biden about the dreamy things community colleges do for their students:
They are students like the mother who shared her experience with us on the White House website of working towards a degree while raising three children and straddling financial challenges. Now employed and the holder of a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, she wrote, “Community colleges didn’t just change my life, they gave me my life.”
Community colleges do that every day.
Ick!
The President, too, couldn’t hide his affection:
So I think it’s clear why I asked Jill to travel the country visiting community colleges -– because, as she knows personally, these colleges are the unsung heroes of America’s education system. They may not get the credit they deserve. They may not get the same resources as other schools. But they provide a gateway to millions of Americans to good jobs and a better life.
Like the guy with the locker next to Mr. and Mrs. Lovebird, all I can say is “oh, come on!”
Community colleges might be a good option for some people, but they are hardly paragons of educational success. Quite the opposite: According to the U.S. Department of Education, they have the worst graduation rates of any two-year sector of higher education. Only around 22 percent of public, two-year college students graduate within three years, versus roughly 49 percent of private, not-for-profit attendees and about 59 percent of private, for-profit students.
Wait! What’s that? Private, for-profit institutions outperform super-cute community colleges…by a lot? But they’re the ugliest, meanest, least popular kids in school! Nobody likes them!
Oh, I know what’s going on here! For-profit schools cost a lot more than community colleges, right? That’s why they’re so disliked.
That’s true if you look at tuition prices. But community colleges get big subsidies from government, especially state and local taxpayers. So they might actually cost a lot, it’s just that they sneak the money out of your back pocket and then congratulate themselves for charging students so little.
When you look at government expenditures per-pupil, including aid to schools and students, it becomes clear that community colleges are, in fact, just as mean and greedy as for-profits. Indeed, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro has calculated that they are actually more costly to taxpayers than for-profit schools (see table 24). According to his calculations, two-year public schools cost taxpayers $6,919 per student, while private, for-profits cost just $3,628.
No wonder the summit turned my stomach! At the same time the administration and its allies in Congress are bashing for-profit schools, the President has a love fest with community colleges that are generally much worse. Unfortunately, it leaves you concluding that for-profits could walk on water and it wouldn’t matter: As long as they’re honest about trying to make a buck, they’ll be beaten up in the parking lot and never invited to any of the cool summits.
The Current Wisdom
NOTE: This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
The Iceman Goeth: Good News from Greenland and Antarctica
How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000? There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.
Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.
Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.
Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.
Actually We Aren’t Running the World
Bloggers have already noted the most glaring problems with Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and Bill Kristol’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Peace Doesn’t Keep Itself,” which worries that conservatives are figuring out that trying to run the world is not conservative.
The op-ed pretends that the fact that defense spending isn’t the largest cause of the deficit means it isn’t a cause of the deficit. It obscures the fact that we spend more on defense than we did in the Cold War by counting the defense budget as a portion of the economy without noting the latter has grown faster than the former.
So I can limit myself to less obvious angles. The first is that neoconservatives like Kristol are for increasing the defense budget no matter what. For them the military is basically an expression of national awesomeness (to use an academic term). Enemies and other details, like what we spend already, come up mainly in the justification phase.
In 2000, when U.S. defense spending was nearly $180 billion lower than today—excluding the wars and adjusting for inflation—Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wanted to increase defense spending by $60 to $100 billion a year. After September 11, they called for a “large” and “substantial” increase. Having got that and then some, Kristol, at least, wants even more. The neoconservative appetite for military spending is insatiable because their militarism is.
Second, I want to pick on one point the op-ed makes because it is both wrong and widely believed: “Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But the peace does not keep itself.”
Where are the ’60s Hippies Now that They’re Needed to Fight Keynesianism?
Keynesian economic theory is the social science version of a perpetual motion machine. It assumes that you can increase your prosperity by taking money out of your left pocket and putting it in your right pocket. Not surprisingly, nations that adopt this approach do not succeed. Deficit spending did not work for Hoover and Roosevelt is the 1930s. It did not work for Japan in the 1990s. And it hasn’t worked for Bush or Obama.
The Keynesians invariably respond by arguing that these failures simply show that politicians didn’t spend enough money. I don’t know whether to be amused or horrified, but some Keynesians even say that a war would be the best way of boosting economic growth. Here’s a blurb from a story in National Journal.
America’s economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today. Nobelist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, and Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, the former chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, achieved an unnerving degree of consensus about the future during an economic forum in Washington. …Krugman and Feldstein, though often on opposite sides of the political fence on fiscal and tax policy, both appeared to share the view that political paralysis in Washington has rendered the necessary fiscal and monetary stimulus out of the question. Only a high-impact “exogenous” shock like a major war — something similar to what Krugman called the “coordinated fiscal expansion known as World War II” — would be enough to break the cycle. …Both reiterated their previously argued views that the Obama administration’s stimulus was far too small to fill the output gap.
Two additional comments. First, if Martin Feldstein’s views on this issue represent what it means to be a conservative, then I’m especially glad I’m a libertarian. Second, Alan Reynolds has a good piece eviscerating Keynesianism, including a section dealing with Krugman’s World-War-II-was-good-for-the-economy assertion.
The Next Step for SpeechNow
The plaintiffs in the SpeechNow.org case have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to decide “whether, under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, the federal government may require an unincorporated association that makes only independent expenditures to register and report as a political committee.”
You can read all about this important case here.
Today’s Challengers, Tomorrow’s Incumbents
It’s not at all clear that the political challengers whose fortunes are raised today won’t try to pull up the ladder of free and open political speech when their own incumbency receives a challenge. The Citizens United decision notwithstanding, the drive to be returned to office is a strong one.
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast (subscribe!), John Samples offers fans of free speech a few things to consider about this and future election cycles:
- “In politics, when people talk about special interests, they don’t mean the people who support them.”
- “[Independent spending on elections] is an unknown factor. Incumbents, even those who win big, live in fear of a big last-minute spending push by outside groups.”
- “The point of campaign speech is voters. The evidence is that they’re going to know more about the incumbent because of the spending. … What the incumbents want really shouldn’t matter because in the end this is a republic and government by the people.”
How ObamaCare Is Destroying Consumer Protections
In this morning’s Charlotte Observer, I explain how ObamaCare is destroying consumer protections. Exhibit A is Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s decision to refund $156 million to its policyholders:
BCBSNC’s refunds show that ObamaCare is leaving seriously ill patients with less protection, not more. Health insurance was hardly perfect before ObamaCare, but BCBSNC’s policyholders had insurance that had pre-funded many of their future medical bills.
Now, ObamaCare has effectively transferred those reserves from the sick to the healthy. Seriously ill policyholders now have less protection against BCBSNC reneging on its commitments to them. Competition used to discourage skimping; ObamaCare rewards it.
Due to space considerations, the editors dropped the parts where I explain (A) how research by Harvard economist (and sometime Obama advisor) David Cutler shows that under ObamaCare’s price controls, insurers must compete to avoid the sick, and (B) that ObamaCare is blocking further innovations — such as those foreseen by University of Chicago economist John Cochrane — that would provide even greater protection to the sick.
Grok Heinlein?
The biographer of the great libertarian science-fiction novelist Robert A. Heinlein will speak at Cato on October 21. I liked Michael Dirda’s Washington Post review of the book:
Picture a Saturday morning during one of those endless summers of the late 1950s and early ’60s. A boy climbs on his red Schwinn bicycle and rides like the wind to the public library, then to several drugstores and thrift shops. He is on a mission. He is looking desperately for a book, any book, by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), the greatest science-fiction writer in the world.
The greatest? Back then, few adolescent sf readers would have seriously questioned such a cosmic truth. Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” was certainly cool (Hari Seldon! Psychohistory!), and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” could be poetic, scary and ghoulish almost at the same time, and, yes, Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination” just might be the single best sf novel of them all, but Heinlein was . . . Heinlein….
[William H.] Patterson even asserts — and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 — that Heinlein “galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.”
I hope you can join us on October 21, or watch it streamed on the web.
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