Archive for February, 2011
Thanassis Cambanis on “Cosmopolitan Isolationism”
Via Erik Voeten, Thanassis Cambanis has a long piece in Sunday’s Boston Globe about academic critics of America’s bipartisan grand strategy. Cambanis rightly points out that Republicans and Democrats basically agree about American strategy, and spend all their time haggling over price and implementation. By contrast, there is a burgeoning group of critics in the academy who disagree:
[The critics'] call for a humbler foreign policy hasn’t gained much of a hearing with the foreign policy elite, and is hardly talked about in mainstream circles. They question many of America’s basic habits and reflexes, at a time when it’s increasingly clear that the “long war” has not eliminated the threat of terrorism or neutralized rogue states and their nuclear black market.
Not every danger rises to the level of an existential threat, these thinkers say; often, the best way to project power is to stay out of other people’s fights. Or as [Barry] Posen, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who is one of the most acerbic proponents of restraint, puts it: “We need to get out of the world’s face.”
[...]
Barry Posen
Posen’s thinking has evolved markedly. In the late 1990s he derided “neo-isolationists” who wanted to minimize American involvements abroad (“Isolationist is what we called the people whose ideas we didn’t like,” he said). Now he counts himself among their number, and has embarked on a book and lecture tour expounding his case for restraint.
There are plenty of reasons why retrenchment should get more of a hearing in contemporary America, Posen says, but he doesn’t think power brokers will take the idea seriously until a definitive crisis limits the Pentagon or the Treasury. “It’s almost as if in foreign and security policy, democratic debate peters out,” Posen says. “If you argue for restraint, people hold up garlic like they would against a vampire and shout ‘Isolationist! Isolationist!’ ”
[...]
For now, the old consensus is running strong. But for the new isolationists, America is at the tail end of an unsustainable experiment that has cost progress at home. America’s interventionist reflex has embroiled it in wars big and small and political disputes whose value to American interests is hard to fathom.
“Maybe I’m hallucinating, but there’s an awareness that this project we’re running isn’t sustainable,” Posen says. “The way we run our strategy generates new little dragons faster than we can slay the old ones.”
’1099′ Repeal Speaks Volumes About ObamaCare
From my latest Kaiser Health News op-ed:
When 34 Senate Democrats joined all 47 Republicans last week to repeal ObamaCare’s 1099 reporting requirement, their votes confirmed what their talking points still deny: ObamaCare will increase the deficit, no matter what the official cost projections say…
This public-choice dynamic [of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs] is why the Congressional Budget Office, the chief Medicare actuary, and even the International Monetary Fund have discredited the idea that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit. It is one of the principal reasons why, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” In other words, the game is rigged in favor of bigger government.
It also explains why the Obama administration is sprinting to implement ObamaCare in spite of a federal court having struck down the law as unconstitutional. The White House needs to get some concentrated interest groups hooked on ObamaCare’s subsidies – fast.
Read the whole thing here.
Is a U.S. Company Assisting Egyptian Surveillance?
Boeing subsidiary Narus reports on its Web site that it “protects and manages” a number of worldwide networks, including that of Egypt Telecom. A recent IT World article entitled “Narus Develops a Scary Sleuth for Social Media” reported on a Narus product called Hone last year:
Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people. Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.
Media advocate Tim Karr reports that “Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.”
It’s very hard to know how Narus’s technology was used in Egypt before the country pulled the plug on its Internet connectivity, or how it’s being used now. Narus is declining comment.
So what’s to be done?
Narus and its parent, the Boeing Company, have no right to their business with the U.S. government. On our behalf, Congress is entitled to ask about Narus’s/Boeing’s assistance to the Mubarak regime in Egypt. If contractors were required to refrain from assisting authoritarian governments’ surveillance as a condition of doing business with the U.S. government, that seems like the most direct way to dissuade them from providing top-notch technology capabilities to regimes on the wrong side of history.
Of course, decades of U.S. entanglement in the Middle East have created the circumstance where an authoritarian government has been an official “friend.” Until a few weeks ago, U.S. unity with the Mubarak regime probably had our government indulging Egypt’s characterization of political opponents as “terrorists and criminals.” It shouldn’t be in retrospect that we learn how costly these entangling alliances really are.
Chris Preble made a similar point ably on the National Interest blog last week:
We should step back and consider that our close relationship with Mubarak over the years created a vicious cycle, one that inclined us to cling tighter and tighter to him as opposition to him grew. And as the relationship deepened, U.S. policy seems to have become nearly paralyzed by the fear that the building anger at Mubarak’s regime would inevitably be directed at us.
We can’t undo our past policies of cozying up to foreign autocrats (the problem extends well beyond Egypt) over the years. And we won’t make things right by simply shifting — or doubling or tripling — U.S. foreign aid to a new leader. We should instead be open to the idea that an arms-length relationship might be the best one of all.
Responding to Akhil Amar on Obamacare
Yale law professor Akhil Amar, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars and a “progressive originalist” of sorts — he joined with Randy Barnett and others on a brief supporting our view of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in the McDonald case — had a fiery op-ed about Judge Vinson’s decision in the Sunday L.A. Times. More than fiery; I’d say intemperate, uncharacteristically so for the mild-mannered Prof. Amar.
Here’s an excerpt:
There is nothing improper in the means that Obamacare deploys. Laws may properly regulate both actions and inactions, and in any event, Obamacare does not regulate pure inaction. It regulates freeloading. Breathing is an action, and so is going to an emergency room on taxpayers’ nickel when you have trouble breathing.
I was all set to respond when I saw that Tim Sandefur had beat me to the punch on PLF’s blog. Here’s an excerpt of that:
Instead [of offering a limiting principle to federal power if the individual mandate passes constitutional muster], he resorts to the saddest of rhetorical tricks–accusing the judge of being like Roger Taney in Dred Scott. Lawyers should have their own “Godwin’s Law”: whoever is first to accuse the judge of being like Dred Scott loses the argument. Amar starts out by saying his students know more about the Constitution than Judge Vinson, but what I wonder is whether Amar’s students will, like their teacher, use false analogies, set up straw men, ignore their opponents’ arguments, and resort to the equivalent of childish name-calling.
Good on ya, Tim! Read the whole thing. David Bernstein and Ilya Somin have similarly chimed in, and similarly cited Tim.
One thing for which I will commend Amar is his adoption of the term “Obamacare.” I’ve never understood how this is a pejorative (unless said with a sneer, but by that standard anything can be pejorative). The one semi-accurate criticism I’ve heard is that the law was mostly written by Congress, not the White House — for which the president got plenty of heat. But that just means it would be better to call it Pelosi-Reid-care, which presumably is no more or less pejorative. In any event, that ship has sailed: Obamacare this abomination (note I didn’t say “Obamination”) will remain.
After Florida, What’s to Be Done about ObamaCare?
Uncertainty over the practical effect of Judge Roger Vinson’s decision on Monday that ObamaCare is unconstitutional in its entirety continues to swirl all across the country. The day after the decision came down, as I noted here on Wednesday, Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, one of the parties to the suit, issued a statement saying: “This means that, for Wisconsin, the federal health care law is dead,” and his state “was relieved of any obligations or duties” to carry out the statute. And just today Alaska’s Governor Sean Parnell asked his attorney general to advise him on whether implementing and enforcing the federal healthcare overhaul would put Parnell in violation of his oath of office. He told reporters that he took an oath to support and defend the constitutions of the United States and Alaska, adding that he has a duty to uphold the law. Other governors and state AGs, to say nothing of insurance companies, employers, and ordinary citizens, are all in the same boat, and will be until the Supreme Court finally decides the matter, which may be a year or more in the offing.
Here’s the legal issue in a nutshell. Two district courts have upheld the statute. Prior to Monday’s ruling, a district court in Virginia found a core element in ObamaCare, the individual mandate, to be unconstitutional. And on Monday Judge Vinson, in the Northern District of Florida, issued a “declaratory judgment,” declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional in its entirety. In his opinion he held that the judgment was “the practical equivalent of specific relief such as an injunction,” and he added that “it must be presumed that federal officers will adhere to the law as declared by the court.” The Obama administration has thus far shown no inclination to “adhere to the law as declared by the court.” Nor has the administration thus far sought to stay any practical effects of the court’s ruling.
Just what those effects may be is what is unclear, leading to the confusion. It would seem, at a minimum, that the parties to the suit are bound by the judgment. If so, at the least, the government has no authority to implement the statute within the jurisdiction of the Northern District of Florida. But beyond that jurisdiction, does the government have authority to do so with respect to those parties? Suppose one of the winning plaintiffs sought to enjoin the government in a jurisdiction that had upheld the statute. On which of the conflicting decisions would the court decide to grant or deny the motion? Suppose the government sought a writ of mandamus from a court in such a jurisdiction, ordering one of the plaintiffs to comply with the statute. Again, on which of the conflicting decisions would the court decide to grant or deny the motion?
The administration could seek to stay the effects of the two decisions that went against it, of course, which isn’t to say a court would necessarily issue such a stay. After all, if it turns out that those rulings are correct, a huge amount of trouble and expense, especially in financially strapped states, will have been for nothing — and vast insurance and medical markets will have been uprooted.
Not surprisingly, therefore, there is action in the political branches to try more quickly to resolve this matter. Yesterday, for example, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli asked the Supreme Court to bypass the normal appeals process and review the decision from that state directly. The Obama Justice Department said it will oppose the motion. Then just today Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and 15 of her Republican colleagues announced that they’re working “to place a moratorium on any further implementation of the statute until there has been final judicial resolution in the pending lawsuits challenging the law.” Of particular note: “The bill delays provisions and new regulations of the Obama health care law not in effect on the date of enactment until final judicial resolution of the lawsuits. The bill does not suspend features of the law already in effect on the date of enactment.” And finally, on the other side of the aisle, Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) has just introduced a “Sense of the Congress” resolution urging the Supreme Court to put the matter on a fast track to resolution. Stay tuned, there’s much at stake.
On Not Leaving Iraq
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq expects to have 17,000 people on his staff after the United States “withdraws” from Iraq at the end of the year, he told the Senate this week. This is astounding. A typical American embassy in a small country might have 100 employees, in a big country such as Great Britain or Russia maybe a few hundred. A staff of 17,000 (including contractors) is not an embassy, it’s an occupation force. Or at least a viceroy‘s staff. Here’s the Washington Post report:
The top U.S. diplomat in Iraq on Tuesday defended the size and cost of the State Department’s operations in that country, telling lawmakers that a significant diplomatic footprint will be necessary after the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of this year.
James F. Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his staff of 8,000 will grow in the coming year to about 17,000 people, the vast majority of whom will be contractors.
And while the State Department is spending about $2 billion annually on Iraq operations now, it plans to spend an additional $1 billion on the construction of facilities in each of the next several years….
We’re spending $2 billion a year now on State Department operations in Iraq alone, and we intend to spend $1 billion a year on construction for some years to come. That’s some withdrawal! I know that when Sen. Barack Obama asked to be entrusted with the presidency by repeatedly saying, “I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home,” he only said “troops.” But I can’t believe that the voters who heard him anticipated leaving thousands of Americans and spending billions of dollars in Iraq for many years.
If members of Congress are looking for ways to cut a trillion-dollar deficit, they might look at our construction and employment and nation-building plans in Iraq.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- Sen. Rand Paul bucks the trend of wimpy spending cut proposals with a more serious plan.
- Perhaps Charlie Sheen’s agent should consider getting him a gig with HUD.
- A Senate Democrat supports a plan that would focus on spending cuts and not tax increases.
- Policymakers should roll back the punishing regulations and taxes that make it difficult for businesses of all races and sizes to succeed.
- Federal energy policy, Newt Gingrich, and “rank gooberism.”
New Rasmussen Poll Finds Modest Support for Restraint
A just-released Rasmussen survey finds that nearly half of all American voters would withdraw troops from Europe and Japan, but fewer than one in three favor leaving U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula. This portion of the survey is attracting most of the attention, but the survey as a whole reveals some modest public support for a strategy of restraint, one in which the U.S. military focuses primarily on defending U.S. security and core interests, and calls on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense.
For example, when asked “Should the U.S. military strategy be to focus narrowly on defending the United States and U.S. interests, or should the U.S. military strategy seek to maintain worldwide stability and peace?” a solid majority of likely voters (55 percent) agreed with the former, with just 34 percent wishing to be the world’s policeman. Other polls have shown even less support for the globo-cop role (e.g. here).
On this point, and the related one of allowing wealthy allies to defend themselves, I was able to drill down in the cross tabs a bit, and I found a few suprising areas of divergence between likely voters, former military, and self-identified members of the Tea Party movement.
There is some obvious overlap in the survey among these three groups (e.g. 30 percent of former military people self-identify as Tea Partiers, compared with just 18 percent of likely voters). Tea Partiers are more likely than LVs to agree with the statement U.S. military strategy should “Focus narrowly on defending the United States and U.S. interests” (66 pct vs. 55 pct), but they are less likely to support removing U.S. troops from Europe (40 pct. vs. 49 pct). Also interesting, this is one of the few areas where the former military members agree more with LVs than Tea Partiers. Those who have served in the military align with TPers (within the margin of error, +/- 3 pct, 95 pct confidence interval) on the question of focusing on defending U.S. interests, but agree with LVs that we should withdraw troops from Europe.
One last point: these and other surveys (including an earlier Rasmussen poll) reveal a considerable gap between what the public believes, and what is actually true. For example, when presented with the true/false question “Most federal spending is spent on only three programs—Social Security, Medicare and national defense,” only 40 percent of respondents correctly answered “True” (38 percent said no, and 22 percent were unsure). A solid majority (65 percent) agreed that “the United States military [is] more powerful than any other nation’s military force,” but that still left a troubling 21 percent who disagreed, and another 14 percent whe were unsure.
That means, as I argued here last year, that those of us responsible for explaining public policy still have a lot of work to do.
Trade Adjustment Assistance Set to Expire?
James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation has an excellent report out today on Trade Adjustment Assistance, and why Congress should allow the program to expire. Without action, it is set to do so on February 12 [$].
Trade Adjustment Assistance is a collection of programs that have been with us since the mid-1970s. The programs provide taxpayer-funded benefits to workers (and firms, and farmers, and entire “communities”) who are harmed – e.g., by losing their job — from import competition. The main program is the Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers program, administered by the Department of Labor and the subject of a paper I wrote in 2007.
It pains me to say that my 2007 call for its abolishment was instead followed in 2009 by an expansion of the program as part of the ‘stimulus’ package. Some of the extra goodies included allowing government workers access to the benefits, extending TAA to service workers (previously the program was applicable only to manufacturing workers) and weakening the link between trade and job losses (i.e., by removing the requirement that the job loss had to be linked to increased imports following a trade liberalization agreement).
Sherk gives a thorough critique of the program in his report, which I encourage you to read in full, but to my mind the important factors are:
First, very few unemployed people are in their unfortunate predicament because of import competition (you heard it here first, folks!). Why should we discriminate between workers based on the cause of their unemployment?
Second, it costs a bundle, an estimated $2.4 billion in 2011 according to the Department of Labor. Research, including the government’s own studies, has shown the program is poor value for money, even by government standards.
Third, and this is where I put on my free trader hat, TAA was originally sold as a way to get those who are harmed from import competition — or, to put it more accurately, those who have become accustomed to artificially created demand for their services by government intervention and taxing consumers – to go along with trade liberalization. But as recent events have shown, that “deal with the mob” has well and truly broken down. Even though TAA was expanded almost two years ago, Democrats are only now making tentative noises about passing the trade agreement with Colombia (nothing on Panama), and the administration agreed to promote the agreement with South Korea only after renegotiation and “improvement.”
TAA – along with much of current Federal activity — belongs at the state level, where local people can decide which benefits unemployed workers (of all stripes) should receive given state resources and priorities, and how best to deliver them.
Reagan’s Libertarian Spirit
At the Britannica Blog I take a look back at Ronald Reagan on the occasion of his impending 100th birthday (February 6):
Libertarians have mixed feelings toward Ronald Reagan. When we’re feeling positive, we remember that he used to say, “Libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.”
Other times, we call to mind his military interventionism, his encouragement of the then-new religious right (“I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”), and his failure to really reduce the size of government. But the more experience we have with later presidents, the better Reagan looks in retrospect….
And in those moments we’re tempted to paraphrase the theme song of All in the Family and say, “Mister, we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again.”
Bonus: The entry contains links to Encyclopedia Britannica entries on such topics as libertarianism and individualism, normally available only to subscribers. More Britannica reflections on Reagan here. Some other Cato thoughts on Reagan here.
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Social Conservatives Offer Irrelevant Solutions
Posted by David Boaz
In today’s Los Angeles Times I write that social conservatives are pointing to real problems, but the only policy solutions they discuss are completely irrelevant to what they call “the high cost of a dysfunctional society”:
Filed under: Government and Politics
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