Archive for March, 2011
The Government Shouldn’t Try to Manage the Communications Marketplace
Matt Yglesias takes my recent post gathering three links a little too seriously. Beyond their subject matter—the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile—the theme running through the links was that they were all to the TechLiberationFront blog, not that “the federal government should not try to manage the development of the communications marketplace.” My humor is a little odd. Not everyone gets to come along….
But it’s true that the federal government should not try to manage the development of the communications marketplace. So I’ll defend that, and first principles, which Yglesias claims to have reached their limits when it comes to communications.
First, I’ll refine my thesis: the government should not manage the communications marketplace.
What is a “marketplace”? The handiest web dictionary has the following two relevant definitions: “1. An open area or square in a town where a public market or sale is set up. 2. The world of business and commerce.”
To “manage” such a thing ["to take charge or care of: to manage my investments"] would be to have a hand in much or all of it—not just meta-rules about the terms of buying and selling, but what may be sold on what terms, often up to and including price and quality.
Given these ordinary meanings, I think “manage the communications marketplace” has a relatively broad connotation, and the argument that the government should not manage the communications marketplace is easy. The give-and-take of the market is a better way to discover consumers’ true interests and to apportion resources to serve them. For all the effort and smarts they put into it, government regulators are at a serious disability compared to the market’s manifold forces. More often than not, regulators serve the interests of the corporations that are well organized to win their succor, and they nurture their own interests in maintaining and growing power.
Thursday Links
- There is a growing gap between Washington policymakers, and the taxpayers and troops who fund and carry out those policies.
- Why do budget and deficit hawks keep sidestepping growing entitlements?
- Don’t forget to join us on Monday, March 28 at 1pm ET for a live video chat with Julian Sanchez on the growing surveillance state.
- The individual mandate in Obamacare is another example of the growing congressional power under the Commerce Clause:
They Were for the War before They Were Against It
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times highlights the zigging and zagging of some leading Republican presidential contenders when it comes to war with Libya.
Particularly noteworthy is Newt Gingrich. “Two weeks ago,” McManus writes:
the former House speaker and possible presidential candidate denounced Obama for not intervening forcefully against Kadafi.
“This is a moment to get rid of [Kadafi],” he urged. “Do it. Get it over with.”
Then Obama intervened in Libya. Was Gingrich pleased?
“It is impossible to make sense of the standard for intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity,” Gingrich said Sunday. “Iran and North Korea are vastly bigger threats…. There are a lot of bad dictators doing bad things.”
That sounded like a flip-flop, so I asked Gingrich what he meant. He responded with an e-mail: “The only rational purpose for an intervention is to replace Kadafi. That is what the president called for on March 3, and after that statement anything less is a defeat for the United States.”
Actually, Gingrich was wrong both before and after Obama (inexplicably) chose to follow his advice. The only rational purpose for the use of the U.S. military is to advance U.S. national security. The Libya operation has never been justified on those grounds — it is a humanitarian mission to protect civilians — and it might actually make a minor and manageable problem far worse.
Qaddafi is a clown and thug; and no one will shed a tear if and when he leaves Libya – feet first or otherwise. But declaring Qaddafi’s ouster to be a suddenly vital U.S. interest, when a few mere months ago he was our supposed great ally in the fight against al Qaeda, epitomizes absurdity. If nothing else, Gingrich and other boosters of military action in Libya should have pondered — before we risked the lives of our troops, and committed the country to a potentially open-ended mission — whether some of the vaunted rebels might, in fact, be even worse than Qaddafi.
But I guess that never occurred to them.
Police Shootings in Miami
Today’s New York Times reports that seven African-American men have been shot and killed by Miami police officers over an eight month period. One officer, who has since been discharged for unrelated misconduct, was responsible for two of the shooting incidents over a span of just days.
Each shooting should be scrutinized on its own merits. The circumstances of each incident matters. However, one question concerns the aggressive culture often found in police “tactical” units, which too often enagage in a reckless style of police work. Since 2009, the Times reports, more than 100 officers have been added to Miami’s tactical units. Another question is whether the Miami police department should be the agency investigating these cases. An impartial investigation into these shootings needs to be conducted.
Go here for related Cato work.
Julian Sanchez Talks Online Privacy on Monday, March 28 at 1pm ET on Facebook
Please join us this coming Monday, March 28 at 1pm Eastern on our Facebook page for a live video presentation, powered by Livestream, from Cato research fellow Julian Sanchez on the current state of online privacy policy.
Here is a brief list of topics he’ll cover:
- An update on current challenges to overturn FISA, and what it means for you and me if those challenges succeed or fail
- How this relates to current and recent efforts to reauthorize the Patriot Act, including a recap of testimony Sanchez recently delivered to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
- What’s on the FBI’s surveillance wish list
- Reflections on the idea of an “online privacy bill of rights“
We hope you can join us next Monday at 1pm Eastern for this event. Be sure to log in to Livestream with your Facebook account so you can chat with each other and submit questions–we’ll try to take as many as we can.
Not a fan of the Cato Institute yet? Join us below:
Allow More Latin American Students into the U.S.
As expected, President Obama’s speech on Latin America, given on Monday in Santiago, Chile, was full of rhetoric but short of substance. He briefly mentioned the willingness of his administration to “move forward” with the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, but didn’t say when he’s submitting them for a vote in Congress. He recognized (again) that drug consumption in the U.S. is fueling drug violence in Mexico and Central America, but stayed away from saying how his more-of-the-same policies will change anything.
Obama’s only tangible pledge was the announcement that his administration will work to increase the number of Latin American students in the U.S. to 100,000. This is laudable, but still unambitious. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), last year there were already over 65,000 Latin Americans studying in this country. This poorly compares to other regions and countries. For example, South Korea alone has over 72,000 students in the U.S. Increasing the number of Latin Americans studying here to 100,000 would still leave the region behind China (127,628) and India (104,897). These countries each may have populations greater than that of Latin America, but, as President Obama said yesterday, Latin America and the U.S. share a common history, heritage and values. One would thus expect that the U.S. would be especially open to students from the region.
Of course, the number of Latin Americans studying here doesn’t depend exclusively on the United States. It depends mostly on the ability of people in the region to afford pursuing a degree in a U.S. college or university. However, it’s telling that, despite Latin America’s growing incomes, fewer people from the region come to the United States to study than a decade ago. The IIE shows that in the school year 2001/02 there were over 68,000 Latin Americans studying in the U.S. After 9/11, new visa requirements had a negative impact on the ability of Latino students to come to the United States.
President Obama should be commended for looking at an area where the U.S. can help Latin America. Still, the U.S. should be more welcoming to students from south of the border. The region is at an important stage in its road towards economic development, and having more U.S. educated Latin Americans can have a significant impact on the region’s fortunes. Just ask Chile’s Chicago Boys, for example.
At First Anniversary, ObamaCare on the Run
One year ago today, President Barack Obama signed ObamaCare into law. I recap ObamaCare’s first year in my latest Kaiser Health News column. Here’s some additional news surrounding the law’s anniversary.
Politico reports that supporters won’t have the vast war chest to defend the law that they once said they would:
Democrats are under siege as they mark the first anniversary of health care reform Wednesday — and they won’t get much help from the star-studded, $125 million support group they were once promised…[N]ine months later, the Health Information Campaign has all but disappeared. Its website hasn’t been updated since the end of last year. Its executive director and communications director are gone. There’s no sign that it has any money. And neither [former senator Tom] Daschle nor [former White House Communications Director Anita] Dunn will return calls asking about it.
Politico also reports on what everyone knows, but few reporters seem willing to say. ObamaCare is unpopular, and growing more so:
Although Democrats insisted that the [law] would become more popular once the congressional debate ended and the benefits started to kick in, the reverse has actually happened. According to a Kaiser Health Tracking poll released Friday, 46 percent of the public opposes the law, up from 40 percent a year ago. Only 42 percent support the law, down from 46 percent a year ago.
Finally, Politico (again) reports that yet another governor — Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal (R) — has refused to implement ObamaCare:
The Louisiana governor’s office gave PULSE the first definitive answer on whether it would run its own health exchange, and it took them only two letters: no. “Obamacare is a terrible policy that needs to be repealed and replaced,” Gov. Bobby Jindal’s press secretary Kyle Plotkin tells PULSE. “It creates enormous new costs and future unfunded liabilities for states financing their Medicaid programs.” That puts him in a similar camp with Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who recently told us that Florida is “not doing anything with regards to the exchange, I don’t believe in the exchange. It doesn’t do anything to improve access to care. It does nothing to drive down health care costs.”
It’s worth emphasizing that Scott and Jindal probably know more about health care than the other 48 governors.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Wednesday Links
- “Since Congress has not declared war on Libya, is American involvement in the Libyan war unconstitutional?”
- A year later, Obamacare still faces bipartisan opposition.
- Public sector unions have awakened a sleeping giant.
- It is irrelevant which way public broadcasting tilts–the problem is that it tilts at all.
- Cato founder and president Ed Crane made a rare media appearance yesterday, joining talk radio host Neal Boortz to discuss Libya and…well, a bunch of other things:
Patrick Henry and Mohammed Nabbous
On this day in 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Liberty or Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia. Fortunately, Henry got the liberty he sought and lived another quarter-century to enjoy the republican government he helped to create. But last night, NPR reported on Mohammed Nabbous, a man who made a similar stand in Libya and almost immediately lost his life in the struggle for liberty.
Henry told his fellow Virginians:
If we wish to be free — if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending — if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!…
Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
Mo Nabbous used modern technology to reach more listeners. NPR’s Andy Carvin called him “the face of Libyan citizen journalism” who started a one-man Internet broadcast, Libya Al-hurra or Free Libya:
The media was so tightly controlled by the Gadhafi regime. And then all of a sudden, as Benghazi was trying to free itself, you started hearing voices coming over the Internet. And one of those first voices to come out was Mo, Mohammed Nabbous.
And he was a fairly tech savvy guy, had worked in the tech industry before. And so he managed to rig together a live stream, using freely available tools and a satellite Internet access. And suddenly, he became their local equivalent of Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, where he was trying to get the world to hear their point of view of what was going on.
And then, only weeks after starting his broadcasts, at the age of 28, Nabbous was killed — on the air, as he broadcast from a firefight in Benghazi. Interviewer Melissa Block recalled that he had been known to say, in words that echo Patrick Henry,
I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid to lose the battle.
Freedom is won by people like Patrick Henry and Mohammed Nabbous. We should remember both of them today, and take inspiration from their example.
Walter Williams, Freedom Fighter
I’ve been fortunate to know Walter Williams ever since I began my Ph.D. studies at George Mason University in the mid-1980s. He is a very good economist, but his real value is as a public intellectual.
He also has a remarkable personal story, which he tells in his new autobiography, Up from the Projects. I’ve read the book and urge you to do the same. It’s very interesting and, like his columns, crisply written.
To get a flavor for Walter’s strong principles and blunt opinions, watch this video from Reason TV. I won’t spoil things, but the last couple of minutes are quite sobering.
I suppose a personal story might be appropriate at this point. My ex also was at George Mason University, and she was Walter’s research assistant. Walter would give multiple-choice tests to students taking his entry-level classes and she was responsible for grading them by sending them through a machine that would “click” for every wrong answer. For almost every student, it sounded like a machine gun was going off. Suffice to say, Walter’s classes were not easy.
So while I’m glad to say he’s my friend, I’m also happy I never took one of his classes.
Libya, Limited Government, and Imperfect Duties
Glenn Greenwald observes that we’re hearing a familiar false dilemma from advocates of intervention in Libya—the same one that was trotted out so frequently in the run-up to the war in Iraq: Either you support American military action, or you must be indifferent to the suffering of civilians under Qadaffi. Bracket for a moment the obvious empirical questions about the general efficacy of bombs as reliable means of alleviating suffering. What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people’s suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn’t come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world.
A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can’t help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it’s much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.
Return to Debt Mountain
Last year I noted that the White House Office of Management and Budget homepage featured a call from the president to “invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt.” Yet, the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of his then-current budget proposal showed that publicly held debt as a share of GDP would rise like the steep slope of a mountain under his policies.
The president’s latest budget proposal was released in February, and according to the CBO’s preliminary analysis, Obama would once again leave “our people” with a mountain of debt:
Given that the quote is clearly embarrassing, one would think that the White House would have taken it down by now. But it’s still there.
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