Archive for December, 2010
UConn’s Streak and Title IX
Last night, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team broke the college hoops consecutive win record of 88 games set by UCLA’s men in the early 1970s. In anticipation of this, UConn coach Geno Auriemma caused a bit of a stir by accusing some male sports fans of being upset because a women’s team was threatening a record set by men.
This does not compute. Somewhere there might be a man upset by this — though I haven’t heard one — but I don’t see why: The UCLA men beat men’s teams, the UConn women have beaten women’s teams. It says nothing bad about men that a women’s team has a longer win streak.
Where there might be en element of gender conflict at play is in how UConn got to this point. According to CBSSports.com columnist Gregg Doyel, UConn hasn’t just beaten other teams during its streak, it’s crushed numerous squads that at least by ranking ought to have been competitive with UConn. (It clobbered 22nd-ranked Florida State by 31 points for win number 89.) The talent pool in women’s basketball, Doyel argues, just isn’t deep enough to produce several teams of UConn’s calibre.
Assuming Doyel is correct, why isn’t there the same depth of talent in women’s hoops as has existed in men’s college basketball since at least the end of UCLA’s streak?
Quite possibly, because there aren’t nearly as many women who care about competing in sports, including basketball, at the highest levels as there are men. It’s a very real possibility supported not only by UConn’s dominance, but by what appears to be a strong tendency of other top women’s teams to win games by relatively lopsided margins, and, most tellingly, by significant athletics evidence beyond hoops. All of that, however, flies in the face of the implicit rationale of Title IX, the federal statute requiring colleges to offer equal athletic opportunities to men and women. The law assumes that colleges that fail to offer proportionate roster spots are discriminating against girls, but the reality is that women might just not want to play sports as fervently as men.
UConn’s dominance might be just one more bit of evidence that it is time to stop assuming that there is rampant, sexist ill will when it comes to college sports, and for government to let people freely choose what interests they pursue. At the very least, it would probably make a lot of people happier than they’d be getting destroyed by the UConn women’s basketball team.
The Incredible Expanding Afghan War
This simple chart dramatizes something that I don’t think most Americans realize: the tripling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by President Obama.
Now it’s true that when candidate Barack Obama vowed, “I will bring this war to an end in 2009,” he was talking about Iraq. In July 2008 he suggested that he would send two more brigades — about 8000 troops — to Afghanistan. He has far exceeded that, and we can only wonder whether the voters who responded to his antiwar message anticipated that he would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by almost as much as he reduced the number in Iraq.
Eisenhower’s Lament
Spurred on by a new release of documents from the archives, the past few weeks have witnessed a renewed interest in the military-industrial complex (MIC), the term forever associated with Dwight David Eisenhower.
Or, at least, that should be the case. Eisenhower – the West Point graduate, career military officer, and hero of World War II – was one of the first to ever use the phrase, in a televised Farewell Address to the nation on January 17, 1961. Over the years, however, the MIC has become a mantra for progressives and left liberals, usually used in tandem with an assault on private enterprise, writ large, or as part of an elaborate conspiracy theory that equates crony capitalism with market economics. The left’s capture of the term has enabled too many on the right to dismiss it out of hand.
That is unfortunate. Dwight David Eisenhower was no liberal; far from it. And though the neoconservatives have attempted to expunge Ike from our collective memory, it is appropriate that his legacy is enjoying yet another revival. For what it’s worth, I’ll be doing my small part, at a half-day conference next month, and throughout 2011, to offer a perspective on the military-industrial complex that might appeal to devotees of limited, constitutional government.
This work will focus not just on Ike’s farewell address, but also on one of his first public addresses, the Chance for Peace Speech, delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 1953. Taken together, the speeches highlight two of Eisenhower’s enduring concerns: opportunity costs, money spent on the military cannot be spent elsewhere; and the political and social costs of the United States becoming a garrison state, the creation of a permanent armaments industry, Ike feared, had already precipitated major changes in the nation’s economy, and threatened to change the nation itself.
Speaking in January 1961, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold War, Eisenhower viewed the MIC as a necessary evil. He viewed the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its sometime communist allies as sufficient justification for maintaining a large standing army, and a vast and technologically advanced Air Force and Navy. He also presided over a dramatic expansion of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and realized (belatedly) that he had far too little control over those weapons and the men tasked with using them.
But I suspect that the permanence of the MIC would be most disturbing to President Eisenhower, were he with us now. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans today spend more on the military than at any time since World War II, and more than twice as much — in inflation-adjusted dollars — than when Ike left office. The general-president clearly failed to convince his fellow Americans of the need to limit the military’s growth. For all practical purposes, the MIC won.
Here’s hoping that many Americans will rediscover Eisenhower, and take heed of his warning, starting in 2011. They could start by supporting efforts to refocus our military on a few core objectives and reduce the Pentagon’s budget.
The FCC Should Not Regulate the Internet
The FCC moves forward with a proposal to regulate Internet service today. It’s a bad idea.
The one thing that pleases me about the ongoing debate over Internet regulation is the durability of Tim Lee’s November, 2008 Cato Policy Analysis, “The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.” My introduction of it is a good synopsis.
The arguments against government regulation in the name of “net neutrality” have not changed: A good engineering principle is not made better if dogmatized and given to lawyers and bureaucrats to enforce as law. The FCC and its regulatory regime are almost sure to be captured by major ISPs and turned to their benefit, used to suppress competition and blunt innovation.
A premise of net neutrality regulation—and much other regulation—is that consumers can’t be relied on to defend their own interests. Taking that premise, which I don’t, it follows that regulators must step in. But that syllogism skips over an additional premise: that regulators can do a better job.
The Istituto Bruno Leoni (Italy) recently published a terrific paper by Slavisa Tasic (a former Cato intern) that applies the insights of behavioral economics to regulators. Academics have typically used behavioral economics to illustrate the fallibility of market actors, but Tasic turns the tables. The paper is called “Are Regulators Rational?”, and it examines the cognitive biases that are likely to produce flawed decision-making on the part of regulators.
Yes, it’s tit-for-tat to the attack on markets implicit in behavioral economics, but it’s a sound and fair paper that opens new insights onto regulation. This is a good time to do that. Too many take it as an article of faith that the FCC will do better than consumers at protecting consumers’ interests.
This is also a good time to remember that the FCC is our national censor. The U.S. government’s censorious reaction to l’affaire WikiLeaks should serve as counsel to people who would subject Internet service providers to even greater federal regulation. Regulated ISPs will be more compliant with government speech controls.
It’s a point worth emphasizing: Regulated ISPs will be more compliant with government speech controls.
For these reasons, in addition to the ones that have come before, federal regulation of the Internet is a bad idea.
Brian Aitken’s Sentence Commuted
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has commuted the seven-year sentence of Brian Aitken, the man wrongfully convicted on firearms charges under that state’s draconian gun laws. Good.
While a full pardon seems more appropriate – the judge in this case should have given the jury instructions on the “moving exception” that protected Aitken – this is at least recognition of an injustice and relief for one man and his family.
The New Jersey state judicial system’s webpage describes the grand jury’s function as “a screening mechanism to protect citizens from unfounded charges.” That didn’t happen in this case. For more on this phenomenon, read this Cato Policy Analysis, “A Grand Façade: How the Grand Jury Was Captured by the Government.”
For more Cato work on criminal justice, check out Tim Lynch’s excellent book, In the Name of Justice.
Getting Serious about Antidumping Reform in 2011
The U.S. antidumping law still enjoys broad bipartisan support in Congress and within pockets of the executive branch. Although some of that support can be chalked up to politicians representing the narrow interests of influential constituencies that have mastered the use of antidumping as a bludgeon to cripple the competition, much more support stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose, history, mechanics, and consequences of the law.
Too many policymakers passively accept the anachronistic rationalizations proffered by the steel industry, labor unions, other big antidumping users, and their hired guns in Washington. Too many buy into the idealized imagery of a patriotic, upstanding American producer working tirelessly to ensure the preservation of well-paying jobs for hard-working Americans, but is suffering the ravages of unscrupulous, predatory foreign traders intent on destroying U.S. firms and monopolizing the U.S. market. What politician could oppose a law presumed to protect that kind of a company against that kind of a scourge?
But when the curtain is peeled back, exposing the reality of the operation of the U.S. antidumping law, one discerns a very different reality. Antidumping measures always raise the costs of firms in downstream industries that rely on the affected imports. The law routinely claims domestic firms as victims. The law is often used as a tool by domestic firms waging battle for supremacy over other domestic firms. Sometimes foreign-owned firms are the petitioners and U.S-owned firms are the respondents. Rarely does the law lead to job creation or job restoration in the domestic industry. And never is the allegation of “unfair trade” substantiated, or even investigated. Myth and misinformation explains the persistence of the U.S. antidumping regime.
Over the next few months, the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies will shine the spotlight on U.S. antidumping policy and update its large body of research on the subject by publishing some new papers and hosting discussions about the prospects for meaningful antidumping reform. The new Congress should pay attention. After all, if renewed talk about completing the Doha Round in 2011 is to become action, so must antidumping reform.
The first of those studies is now available on the Cato home page. That paper describes the evolution of U.S. antidumping policy from an obscure offshoot of competition law into the predominant instrument of contingent protection that it is today and provides an account of some of the crucial statutory and administrative changes that have occurred over the decades. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the increase in antidumping activity reflects several developments that have nothing to do with foreign behavior whatsoever, including a progressive expansion of the definition of dumping, relaxation of evidentiary standards, and a pro-domestic-industry bias in the law’s administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The arcane mix of statutory rules and discretionary whims that emerged as contemporary antidumping policy is a far cry from the first antidumping law—in practice and intent. Today, antidumping is little more than an elaborate excuse for run-of-the-mill protectionism. And overwhelmingly, U.S. businesses and consumers are its victims.
Bush Deception Points
Former President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points is apparently selling quite well. The book includes a defense of the president’s fiscal record, and a table on page 447 compares Bush to prior presidents on spending and debt (you can see the table on Amazon’s search inside feature).
One problem with the table is that Bush claims credit for the low spending and debt of President Clinton’s last year, fiscal 2001. The first budget Bush crafted was for fiscal 2002. Here are the data reported by Bush, and data recalculated to better reflect the budgets that each president had some control over. Figures are averages over the fiscal year periods, measured as a share of GDP:
Decision Points Comparison: Clinton (1993-2000) 19.8%, Bush (2001-2008) 19.6%.
More Accurate Comparison: Clinton (1994-2001) 19.4%, Bush (2002-2009) 20.4%.
The book makes Bush look better on spending, but a more accurate comparison shows Clinton to have a better record.
It’s true that Bush was not responsible for some of fiscal 2009 spending, and if we take that year out Bush would have average spending of 19.8%. But consider the direction of spending under the two presidents–spending fell under Clinton from 21.4% to 18.2%, but it increased under Bush from 18.2% to 20.7% by fiscal 2008 (and even higher in fiscal 2009). (Spending data are here).
The table in Decision Points also shows Bush looking better than Clinton on public debt as a share of GDP, averaged over each president’s tenure. But the debt data has the same time period problem as the spending data. More importantly, Clinton delivered surpluses his last four years in office, which handed Bush a budget with very low debt and low interest costs. The low interest costs helped mask the spending-increase policies of Bush for a number of years. But Bush’s profligacy eventually became clear to analysts and the public alike, and this autobiography cannot undo his record as the biggest spender since LBJ.
Final note: yes, I understand that Congress plays a large role in federal budgeting, but so do presidents. Presidents propose annual budgets, they twist arms and use the bully pulpit to increase or cut programs, they support legislation to expand or contract entitlement programs, and they sign or veto appropriation and authorization bills.
Government Program Immortality
Who said: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”?
As political junkies know, that was Ronald Reagan at the 1964 Republican convention. The Internet attributes other similar quips to Reagan.
Reagan apparently borrowed the idea from Senator James F. Byrnes, who stated on the floor of the Senate in 1933: “The nearest earthly approach to immortality is a bureau of the federal government.”
My source is “Reorganization of Federal Administrative Agencies,” Congressional Quarterly, September 17, 1933. The article is a reminder that concerns about government waste, duplication, overlap, and inefficiency certainly did not start with Reagan. Government failure has been around a long time.
The CQ article notes that the 1932 Democratic platform called for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance, to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government.”
Alas, that leaner-government policy was not exactly the approach followed by FDR.
Mega-Consumers against Consumerism
Adjacent articles in the latest New Yorker deplore “consumerism” among the American revolutionaries and the modern Chinese. You wonder how a magazine so concerned about manifestations of consumer desire would support itself. Surely it struggles along on a shoestring, preaching the message of austerity and simplicity to sincere but poor readers. In fact, however, these laments about consumerism in societies vastly poorer than our own are sandwiched between lush full-page advertisements for Chanel watches, Samsung home entertainment centers, single malt Scotch, Grey Goose vodka, Cristal champagne, David Yurman jewelry, German automobiles, and Norwegian Cruise Lines. The articles themselves appear on pages lined with small, elegant ads for Jay-Z’s book-ebook-app, tours of Wales, monogram rings, Aeron chairs, European berets, cashmere caps, and a remarkable number of expensive psychiatric facilities, perhaps specializing in the treatment of cognitive dissonance.
Lame Duck Won’t Create Race-Based Government After All
Good news out of Congress this week (and by good news, I mean they didn’t screw things up any more than they already are): The infamous Akaka Bill, which would create a “Native Hawaiian” government for purposes of racial preferences and other unconstitutional goodies, will not be a part of the slimmed-down legislation that funds the government until Congress gets around to passing an actual budget. (For background, see my op-eds here – for which I was attacked by Hawaii’s Governor-Elect Neil Abercrombie – and here, and watch the Cato Capitol Hill Briefing. And for coverage of a related recent Supreme Court case, see these two blogposts and Cato’s amicus brief.)
Three weeks ago, there had been fears that the Akaka language would be inserted into the omnibus spending bill (see Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky blogging at NRO’s The Corner). Had that been the case, it would’ve been an outrage for several reasons:
- This is a new Akaka Bill. The text was only introduced in November and was apparently the result of a backroom deal cut between the Hawaii’s senators and lame-duck Governor Linda Lingle in July, but which did not become public until after the election.
- There have never been any hearings on this language — not in the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, not in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and definitely not in Hawaii. No testimony has been heard about how this particular bill will divide Hawaii, on the constitutionality of the new provisions, how Hawaiians’ civil rights will be affected, or how the tax base of Hawaii will be diminished.
- This is an abuse of the process. It is completely inappropriate to use a must-pass spending bill to avoid debate, amendment, and public scrutiny on an unrelated matter of such grave constitutional and practical importance.
- Sen. Inouye (D-HI) previously denied that he planned to use the appropriations process to avoid public scrutiny of the bill, so this would have been a 180-degree reversal.
Perhaps bowing to the above kinds of arguments, what actually appeared in the mega-bill was a “study” that the Secretary of the Interior had to conduct in conjunction with “those offices designated under the Hawaii State Constitution as representative of the Native Hawaiian community,” to make recommendations to Congress “on developing a mechanism for the reorganization of a Native Hawaiian governing entity and recognition by the United States of the Native Hawaiian governing entity as an Indian tribe.” In other words, this was getting the ball moving, establishing facts on the ground, etc.
Fortunately — for many reasons unrelated to race-based government – the omnibus went down in flames (the first tangible victory for the Tea Party, before their congressmen even assumed office?) and with it the aforementioned “study.” The new streamlined “continuing resolution,” which I’ve skimmed in its entirety — just 36 pages! – still includes various legislative gems but there is no mention of the Aloha State.
That’s a good thing: we seem to have escaped the spectre of race-based government yet again — but be aware that the Akaka Bill lurks in the background of every Congress, ready to ensnare those who think it’s just about “parochial” Hawaii issues that have nothing to do with the “real world.”
Cigarette Taxes and Smuggling
The Mackinac Center’s Michael LaFaive and Todd Nesbit have released a new study on the ill-effects of raising cigarette taxes at the state and local level. Cigarette tax hikes have become a popular choice for spend-happy state policymakers looking for money in these tough economic times.
Also check out their accompanying video on the topic:
Who Should Defuse the Korean Bomb?
Fear of war has become a new constant for the Korean peninsula. On Monday South Korea initiated a military exercise in the Yellow Sea and North Korea threatened to retaliate. Seoul went ahead without any response from the North, but the region retains the feel of a bomb with an unstable fuse.
In the short term Washington has no choice but to uphold its alliance obligations to the South. However, Pyongyang’s increasingly erratic behavior offers a dramatic reminder of the most important cost of the unilateral security guarantee: the threat of war.
The alliance was created at a different time in a different world—1953, after the conclusion of a war which had devastated the peninsula. Only U.S. military support preserved South Korea’s independence. Since then the South has developed economically and is well able to protect itself. The U.S. should begin turning over defense responsibilities to Seoul, with an expeditious withdrawal of all American troops. The defense treaty, with America’s promise to forever guard the South, irrespective of circumstance, should be turned into a framework for future cooperation in cases of mutual interest.
The U.S. no longer can afford to maintain Cold War alliances as if the Cold War still existed. Commitments like that to South Korea are expensive, since they drive America’s military budget. More important, as we see in Northeast Asia, alliances also increase the possibility of war for the U.S. It is time to update America’s military commitments to reflect today’s world.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
