Archive for November, 2010
Everything Old Is New Again
With America in trouble, I’ve been pleased to see some fresh, innovative thinking emanating from Washington. What can brighten the country’s future?
- Anne Applebaum proposes that
Institutions should do what they are good at. And the expansion of NATO is one of the few true post-Cold-War foreign-policy success stories…
We could continue that process. The stakes are lower — 2010 is not 1990, and the countries outside NATO are poorer and more turbulent than even those that have recently joined. Nevertheless, the very existence of a credible Western military alliance remains — yes, really — an encouragement to others on Europe’s borders. This is a uniquely propitious moment. Right now there is a pro-Western government in Moldova; Ukraine’s geopolitics are up in the air; elections are due to take place in Belarus in December. We in the West might have gone sour on ourselves, but Europeans on our borders still find us magnetically attractive. But we will only remain so if we try.
- David “National Greatness Conservatism” Brooks thinks he’s found the solution: a “national greatness agenda” and a new political movement—maybe a third party!—whose “goal will be unapologetic: preserving American pre-eminence.” This movement could seek to “end the mortgage deduction and tax employer health care plans and raise capital gains taxes and cut benefits for affluent seniors.”
- Meanwhile, the Republican Party seems to think what the country needs is a good jolt of religion-infused nationalism.
With this sort of fresh, innovative thinking, maybe we can’t miss!
WikiLeaks, the Law, and Common Sense
With the third WikiLeaks dump now before us, and more promised down the road, two questions that arise are whether prosecutions of those responsible are possible and what can be done to better protect classified material. Neither question admits of easy answers. One can start, however, by noting that overclassification is a perennial problem in government, and correcting that problem would go far toward more open government better able to protect classified material.
That said, whether in families or foreign affairs, confidences are necessary, and the need to keep those confidences is inescapable.
Accordingly, one can say with certainty that any government official who knowingly downloaded and then released classified documents to a person unauthorized to see or possess them, as Private First Class Bradley Manning is alleged to have done, can be prosecuted under any number of federal statutes. With respect to someone like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, however, the issues are more complex. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the Justice and Defense Departments are conducting a criminal investigation, presumably under the Espionage Act of 1917. That is a vague statute that may be broad enough to enable the president, under his foreign affairs powers, to go after someone who disseminates such documents. But it has rarely been used, and never against a publisher.
The larger question, however, is how all of this was allowed to happen. Speaking from personal experience, during two brief stints at the State and Justice Departments during the Reagan administration I held a Top Secret clearance, which gave me access to highly classified materials. At that time, however, just to see those materials we had to go to the inner sanctums at State and Justice—areas that were shielded from any kind of eavesdropping—and then the materials were brought to us by agents who stayed with us while we read them. In light of that experience, I find it incredible that a young Army PFC could download this material and go undetected for long enough to disseminate it and boast about it afterward. More than anything else, this is one more government failure. Heads should roll, but mostly the heads of those who enabled so lax a system to exist.
Wikileaks Sheds Light on Government Ineptitude
For years I have told anybody who would listen how U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan contribute to Pakistan’s slow-motion collapse. Well it appears that my take on the situation was not so over-the-top. Amid some 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables released by online whistleblower Wikileaks, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson warned in cable traffic that U.S. policy in South Asia “risks destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal.”
On one level, this cable underscores what a disaster American foreign policy has become. But on another level, the leak of this and other cables strikes me as completely odd and slightly scary. How did Pfc. Bradley Manning, who stands accused of stealing the classified files from Siprnet and handing them to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, obtain access to these files in the first place? How does a young, low-level Army intelligence analyst gain access to a computer with hundreds of thousands of classified documents from all over the world?
After 9/11, the government made an effort to link up separate archives of government information. In theory, anyone in the State Department or the U.S. military can access these archives if he has: (1) a computer connected to Siprnet, and (2) a “secret” security clearance. As Manning told a fellow hacker: “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing… [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” Manning said he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months.”
I’m all for less government secrecy, particularly when U.S. officials are doing bizarre things like tabulating the biometric data of various UN officials, the heads of other international institutions, and African heads of state. That these supposedly “confidential” communications were so easily leaked highlights the appalling ineptitude of our unwieldy national security bureaucracy. Indeed, the phenomenon of Wikileaks says as much about government policy as it does about government incompetence.
No, Senator Durbin, Earmarks Are Not Transparent
This morning the full Senate voted down a proposed rule that would have barred earmarks for the next two years. Part of the reason? Earmarks are transparent.
Here’s Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), quoted in a Hill article:
There is full disclosure in my office of every single request for an appropriation. We then ask those who have made the requests to have a full disclaimer of their involvement in the appropriation, so it’s there for the public record. This kind of transparency is virtually unprecedented.
Senator Durbin doesn’t know transparency. Take a look at Senator Durbin’s earmark disclosures. Yes, you can read through them, one by one. But can you make a list of recipients? Can you add up the totals? Can you search for common words in the brief explanations for each earmark? Can you make a map showing where recipients of Senator Durbin’s requests are?
No, no, no, and no.
That’s because Senator Durbin puts his request disclosures out as scanned PDFs. Someone on his staff takes a letter and puts it on a scanner, making a PDF document of the image. Then the staffer posts that image on the senator’s web site. It’s totally useless if you want to use the data for anything. Notably, Senator Durbin doesn’t even include the addresses of his earmark recipients.
Voters Recognize U.S. Military Spending Tops Other Countries
That is the headline of a press release announcing the results of a recent Rasmussen poll. The survey of likely voters finds that 58 percent recognize that the United States spends more on its military than any other country in the world.
The headline writers have obviously taken this as a positive. I think one can just as easily spin it in the other direction. It is deeply disturbing that 19 percent of Americans think that some country spends more than us, and that another 24 percent are unsure.
I don’t think this is just a reflection of my recent penchant for finding the dark lining in every silver cloud. If I were a professor teaching a course in U.S. military history, I’d be distressed if 19 percent of my students thought that Robert E. Lee was victorious at the battle of Gettysburg, and that another 24 percent weren’t sure. If 19 percent of students in a basic economics course thought that the price of something rises when demand falls and supply increases, and another 24 didn’t know, that would be a problem. Likely voters are presumably more interested in policy than registered voters or the generic American adult. Even among this modestly self-selected group, it would be unrealistic to expect that 100 percent would have a clear understanding of some basic facts. But 58 percent is a failing score, even by the most generous standards.
The respondents could be excused for their ignorance or confusion if someone was arguing the contrary. But no one is. The fact that we have an enormous military budget — far larger than any other country, or combination of countries — is the public policy equivalent of the sun rising in the east. Even the hawks calling for additional increases in Pentagon spending (on top of a DoD budget that has grown more than 86 percent in real terms over the past 13 years) don’t dispute the fact that we currently spend more than anyone else. On the contrary, all experts agree that we spend much more than number two (China), and most calculate that 300 million Americans spend nearly as much on our military as do all other citizens of the world combined. (More than 44 percent of the world total, according to conservative estimates that likely overstate China and Russia’s actual spending.)
So while some might be encouraged that only 19 percent of likely voters think that some country spends more than us, and that another 24 percent aren’t sure, I am not. It suggests that I have a lot more work to do.
Social Security Disability Benefits Unsustainable
The disability insurance component of Social Security was created in 1956 to provide income support to individuals aged 50 to 64 who were permanently disabled. As is typical with government programs, eligibility and benefits were greatly expanded over the subsequent decades.
SSDI, which is funded through a 1.8 percent payroll tax on all workers, was recently described by the Congressional Budget Office as “not financially sustainable.” The following chart shows that SSDI benefit payments have soared 119 percent since 1995 in real or inflation-adjusted terms:
“Public Schools Have to Take Everyone…
…and don’t privilege the wealthy who can pay for special access.” Well, no — those are two great myths exploded in this piece about Chicago’s public schools. Remember the article next time you hear that school choice is unacceptable because it keeps everyone from having equal access to great schools.
Supreme Court Accepts Another Chance to Reverse Ninth Circuit, Uphold First Amendment
Today, the Supreme Court agreed to review McComish v. Bennett (consolidated with Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett), which challenges Arizona’s public financing of elections as an unconstitutional abridgment of speech. Because the case concerns a crucial new battleground in the fight between free speech and “fair” (read: government-controlled) elections, Cato filed an amicus brief supporting the cert petitions filed by our friends at Goldwater Institute and the Institute for Justice.
McComish centers on Arizona’s “Clean Elections” Act, which provides matching funds to publicly funded candidates if their privately funded opponent spends above certain limits. In other words, by ensuring that his speech will not go “unmatched” by his opponent, the privately funded candidate is penalized for working too hard and speaking too much. The law violates established Supreme Court precedents that have consistently held that forcing a speaker to “disseminate hostile views” as a consequence of speaking abridges the freedom of speech. Although the Ninth Circuit upheld the Arizona law, the Second Circuit recently struck down a similar Connecticut law, thus creating a circuit split that undoubtedly encouraged the Court to take the case.
In 2008 the Court decided Davis v. FEC (in which Cato also filed a brief), which overturned the “millionaires amendment” to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform.” That provision gave similar assurances to candidates faced with the possibility of being outspent by their opponent. There, however, the concern was with rich, self-funded candidates: The act provided increased fundraising limits — triple the amount normally allowed — for candidates whose opponents spent too much (by the government’s judgment) of their own money on their campaign. The Davis Court held that this provision “impose[d] an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises [his] First Amendment right.”
The Arizona law is even worse. It doesn’t even delve into the messiness of fundraising — tripling the contribution limit does not, after all, mean that those funds will be raised — but rather guarantees that a candidate’s “robus[t] exercise[] of [his] First Amendment right” will be met with contrary speech from his opponent. And the law sweeps still broader: it applies the same matching funds provision to groups that spend independently from any campaign but are nevertheless deemed to be supporting a given candidate. Such “uncoordinated speech” by third parties — speech that, many times, the candidate does not want even if it is thought to be on his behalf — also triggers matching funds for the candidate’s opponent.
The end result, as extensive evidence shows, is that numerous speakers — from the candidate to the independent groups — will be reluctant to spend money to speak (which is, of course, required for nearly all effective campaign speech) because their opponents are guaranteed the funds needed to reply. In elections, where the freedom of speech “has its fullest and most urgent application,” such laws simply cannot fly.
Finally, it is also worth remembering what is at stake when we allow politicians to pass laws that determine the very rules by which they hold their jobs. Justice Scalia put this most poignantly in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce: “the Court today endorses the principle that too much speech is an evil that the democratic majority can proscribe. I dissent because that principle is contrary to our case law and incompatible with the absolutely central truth of the First Amendment: that government cannot be trusted to assure, through censorship, the ‘fairness’ of political debate.” As we now well know, the Court overruled Austin this past January in Citizens United, vindicating Scalia’s pro-free speech position.
It will be exciting to see how McComish unfolds. Expect another Cato amicus brief early in the new year, oral arguments in the spring, and a decision by the end of June.
Random Thoughts on WikiLeaks
I’ve fielded some questions today about the WikiLeaks story, and I’m feeling pretty conflicted.
I’m aware of the fact that the leak of classified information could pose a short-term risk to national security, but it is my sense that most of the claims of dire harm are overwrought. There is considerable evidence that much — perhaps most — classified material is improperly classified; governments oftentimes invoke claims of secrecy to shield themselves from embarrassment, not to protect national security. In that sense, some diplomats and government officials might be red in the face today, but I doubt that most Americans are feeling less secure than before the latest revelations from WikiLeaks.
If I thought that the attention on minute and often mundane details that shouldn’t be classified precipitated a closer look at overclassification, WikiLeaks might have a beneficial side effect. As it is, however, it is likely to increase the government’s obsession with secrecy, with policymakers scrambling to close down supposedly dangerous loopholes, some of which were opened up after 9/11 to facilitate information-sharing between agencies. This process of clamping down on interagency collaboration has already begun.
As to the particulars, with respect to diplomatic correspondence, there is a tension between individuals sharing their genuine opinions about another country, or that country’s leaders, and concern that their candid assessments in private conversations be revealed. People do keep secrets from one another, including their friends, spouses and family members. It is basic human nature. And it is basic human nature to clam up the next time you’re talking to a friend who recently blabbed your secrets to a third party. As such, the WikiLeaks episode might have a chilling effect on candor, but I believe that this effect will dissipate over time.
Concern that this will undermine U.S. diplomatic standing, or otherwise lead people to question the U.S. government’s capacity for conducting foreign policy, is misplaced. We don’t (or shouldn’t) question the U.S. Army’s ability to conduct military operations because of the occasional friendly fire incident. Given the volume of documents released in now several Wikileaks’ rounds, some might ask whether this is the equivalent of many thousands of unfortunate incidents, and therefore a sign of a systemic failure. I doubt it. The vast majority of individuals in possession of classified material treat this information with great care. More to the point, I am confident that this will be a minor episode in U.S. diplomatic history when compared to huge blunders such as the war in Iraq and the deepening — and open-ended — war in Afghanistan.
Three Cheers for Switzerland as Voters Reject Class-Warfare Tax Hike in National Referendum
I’ve always had a soft spot for Switzerland. The nation’s decentralized structure shows the value of federalism, both as a means of limiting the size of government and as a way of promoting tranquility in a nation with several languages, religions, and ethnic groups. I also admire Switzerland’s valiant attempt to preserve financial privacy in a world dominated by greedy, high-tax governments.
I now have another reason to admire the Swiss. Voters yesterday overwhelmingly rejected a class-warfare proposal to impose higher tax rates on the income and wealth of rich residents. The Social Democrats did their best to make the hate-and-envy scheme palatable. Only the very richest taxpayers would have been affected. But Swiss voters, like voters in Washington state earlier this month, understood that giving politicians more money is never a solution for any problem.
Here’s an excerpt from Bloomberg’s report on the vote.
In a referendum today, 59 percent of voters turned down the proposal by the Social Democrats to enact minimum taxes on income and wealth. Residents would have paid taxes of at least 22 percent on annual income above 250,000 francs ($249,000), according to the proposed changes. Switzerland’s executive and parliamentary branches had rejected the proposal, saying it would interfere with the cantons’ tax-autonomy regulations. The changes would also damage the nation’s attractiveness, the government, led by President Doris Leuthard, said before the vote. The Alpine country’s reputation as a low-tax refuge has attracted bankers and entrepreneurs such as Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish founder of Ikea AB furniture stores, and members of the Brenninkmeijer family, who owns retailer C&A Group.
It’s never wise to draw too many conclusions from one vote, but it certainly seems that voters usually reject higher taxes when they get a chance to cast votes. Even tax increases targeting a tiny minority of the population generally get rejected. The only exception that comes to mind is the unfortunate decision by Oregon voters earlier this year to raise tax rates.
O’Grady on the US-Colombia FTA
Mary Anastasia O’Grady has an excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal on the Obama administration’s failure to push the U.S.-Colombia preferential trade agreement. She rightly points out that the terms of the agreement should be especially favorable to mercantalists, since the agreement would see no reductions in the tariffs the United States places on Colombian goods — most of which already enter duty-free under the terms of the Andean Trade Preference Act — but will oblige Colombia to open its markets to those U.S. exports the administration is always banging on about.
Obama Adopts Cato Pay Proposal
The Obama administration is supporting a two-year freeze on federal pay. I haven’t seen the details yet, but this appears to be a good start at getting excessive government pay under control.
I’ve been calling for a pay freeze since an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2006. Since then, average federal pay has continued to soar far above average private pay, which has finally prompted policymakers to take note.
The Obama proposal would apparently save $28 billion over five years. Hopefully, that will be the first of many budget savings that the administration and Republicans in Congress can work on together in coming months. I’ve described other ways to tackle the government’s overspending problem here.
The next step to reform federal worker compensation should be to pare back overly generous benefit packages — for example, by eliminating defined-benefit pension plans, which come on top of the defined-contribution pensions that federal workers enjoy.
Another step would be to call in an outside human resources firm to audit the federal pay methodology, particularly the mysterious formula used to calculate the federal “pay gap,” which purports to show that federal workers are grossly underpaid.
See this essay on overpaid federal workers for details on reforming federal pay.
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