Archive for August, 2011
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:
- It’s darkly comical that the same entity responsible for killing countless private sector jobs with its taxes and regulations operates job training programs.
- Warren Buffett should put up or shut up.
- Two polls of likely voters released by Rasmussen Reports indicate that the federal government’s corporate welfare programs should be prime targets for spending cuts.
- The Washington Post asks for budget plans. We have one.
- Despite Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in driving the housing bubble and $160 billion in taxpayer losses (so far), President Obama appears to be considering just putting the same failed system in place.
Follow Downsizing the Federal Government on Twitter (@DownsizeTheFeds) and connect with us on Facebook.
‘Counterfeit Comfort’
Steve Chapman on sex offender registries:
Most convicted sex offenders do not go on to be arrested for new sex offenses, and more than 90 percent of child victims are assaulted not by strangers but by relatives or other people they know.
Sex offender registries may cause parents to focus on the remote peril while ignoring the more pertinent one. And, as in the examples cited earlier, they can inflict harsh punishment that departs from common sense and does nothing for public safety.
Shielding citizens from vicious predators is unquestionably one of the central functions of any sound government. Megan’s Laws were enacted in the sensible pursuit of that goal. What they offer in practice, though, is counterfeit comfort.
Read the whole thing. Lenore Skenazy has more thoughts about this here.
The Heritage Foundation is not only making the case for registries, but is making the case for federal intervention in this area. Wrong. Like education, crime-fighting is a subject the feds should stay out of. See the Tenth Amendment (pdf).
Rick Perry, Arne Duncan, and Michael Jackson
To my astonishment, Arne Duncan went after Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry yesterday on the grounds that Perry hasn’t done enough to improve the schools under his jurisdiction. According to Bloomberg News, Duncan said public schools have “really struggled” under Perry and that “Far too few of [the state's] high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college.”
I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan, but for some reason his “Man in the Mirror” track just popped into my head as I read this. You see, once upon a time, Arne Duncan was “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools. During and for some time after his tenure, he was celebrated as having presided over “The Chicago Miracle,” in which local students’ test results had improved dramatically. That fact turns out to have been fake, but accurate. The state test results did improve, but not because students had learned more; they appear to have improved because the tests were dumbed-down.
When this charge was first leveled, I decided to look into it myself, and found that it was indeed justified. There was no “Chicago Miracle.” Arne Duncan ascended to the throne of U.S. secretary of education, at least in part, on a myth. The academic achievement of the children under his care stagnated at or slightly below the level of students in other large central cities during his time at the helm. Seems an opportune occasion for someone to “start with the man in the mirror, asking him to change his ways.”
If Only Government Schools Would Go Extinct
I don’t know much about Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, though I appreciate his resisting federal bribery in education. I can, though, say that the dustup over his remarks yesterday concerning the age of the Earth, and whether some Texas schools teach creationism alongside evolution, is not a sad commentary on him. It’s a damning commentary on public schooling.
First, let’s get the facts straight: No, it wouldn’t be constitutional to advocate creationism in public schools, though it might be acceptable to teach the religious basis for it without declaring it the truth. Even without possible legal finessing, however, it is very likely that teachers are discussing creationism in Lone Star science classes, and just about every other state’s. As a groundbreaking survey of high school biology teachers recently found, about 13 percent of surveyed teachers explicitly teach creationism or intelligent design in their classes, and about 60 percent dance around evolution, sometimes by teaching numerous views on the subject.
How could this be happening?
About 40 percent of Americans believe that roughly 10,000 years ago God created human beings as we currently exist, and they aren’t going to just let the schools for which they have to pay taxes ignore that. Nor should they: ours is a nation built on individual liberty, and government attacks that at its core when it compels people to support schools that either teach things they find abhorrent or fails to teach things they feel essential. Of course, those who oppose the teaching of creationism are equally justified in standing up for their convictions — hence the creationist black market and constant public-schooling conflict.
The solution: Let parents choose educational options consistent with their norms and beliefs, especially through tax credit programs that allow individuals or corporations to choose what kinds of schools they’ll support. And yes, many people will select options others will dislike, but that’s both a part of freedom and the key to getting coherent and transparent curricula for all.
As a side — but hugely important — note, it is very dangerous to let government declare scientific “winners.” Reality — while very hard to truly know — is not determined by “consensus,” or who can convince the most politicians of something. It simply is. As a result, letting something become officially approved thought is to be assiduously avoided. But don’t take my word for it: Just read up on John Scopes and the huge challenges he faced trying to teach kids about offically forbidden evolution.
Libertarianism’s Cross-Cutting Appeal
NPR’s Ari Shapiro reports from New Hampshire on Ron Paul, including this heart-warming story:
Robin and Tom Jacubic are husband and wife who had sat on opposite ends of the political spectrum for years.
“I was for Ned Lamont because he was anti-war,” says Robin, “and when the Democrats took over in 2006, nobody did anything to stop the war, so I found Dr. Paul from there.”
“He is the only one in the Republican race that knows what he’s doing, knows what he’s saying and has the answers,” adds her conservative husband.
After a decade of married life supporting opposing political candidates, “We found each other in libertarianism,” says Robin.
For more on fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters, read “The Libertarian Vote.”
Why Is the Tappan Zee Bridge in the Wrong Place?
David Kestenbaum of NPR Planet Money reports this morning:
You would never look at a map of the Hudson River, point to the spot where the Tappan Zee Bridge is, and say, “Put the bridge here!”
The Tappan Zee crosses one of the widest points on the Hudson — the bridge is more than three miles long. And if you go just a few miles south, the river gets much narrower. As you might expect, it would have been cheaper and easier to build the bridge across the narrower spot on the river.
Was there in fact a good engineering reason to put the bridge there, one that escaped the notice of the NPR reporter? Was there a good economic reason, perhaps avoiding expensive property confiscations?
Well, it won’t surprise readers of Cato-at-Liberty to discover that the bridge is in the wrong place because it made money for the State of New York:
If the bridge had been built just a bit south of its current location — that is, if it had been built across a narrower stretch of the river — it would have been in the territory that belonged to the Port Authority.
As a result, the Port Authority — not the State of New York — would have gotten the revenue from tolls on the bridge. And [Gov. Thomas E.] Dewey needed that toll revenue to fund the rest of the Thruway.
Now the bridge needs repairs, which will cost more because the bridge is three miles long, instead of one mile long as it could have been. In Libertarianism: A Primer (page 199), I cited the work of the Italian fiscal theorist Amilcare Puviani, who asked, If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of its population, what would it do? He came up with 11 tactics, from inflation and borrowing to extraordinary budget complexity. I wonder if “placing a bridge in an inefficient place so that we get the tolls instead of another government” is covered by one of his strategies.
End the Mortgage Interest Deduction
The mortgage interest income tax deduction is popular among homeowners (read: likely voters) despite its role in distorting housing and related markets, its contribution to the housing bubble and its enabling of additional household debt. Never mind that there isn’t much evidence that the deduction boosts home ownership in the United States. Consider also that the tax break largely benefits affluent homeowners living in expensive urban areas.
As Mark Calabria notes in today’s Cato Daily Podcast, it’s well past time for the mortgage interest deduction to be replaced by lower marginal tax rates for all earners.
Of Arms and the Guv
Former Catoite Chris Moody has a fun piece up on the Yahoo News site: “If elected president, Rick Perry could still jog with his gun.”
If you haven’t heard the famous anecdote about Perry shooting a coyote during a gubenatorial jog in Austin last year, you can read about it Chapter Two of his book Fed Up!
He praises federalism for giving the people of the several states the ability to elect leaders befitting the states’ respective characters: “in Massachusetts, they elect people like “Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barney Frank repeatedly–even after actually knowing about them and what they believe!” He continues:
“Texans, on the other hand, elect folks like me. You know the type, the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”
All right, it’s a cool story. But come on Governor: tough guys don’t preen.
I don’t have a serious legal opinion about the question explored in Moody’s piece–whether the next “decider” could decide to carry a gun, local laws notwithstanding.
But in the spirit of the goofy hypothetical, it strikes me that, despite their differing styles, Bush and Obama were both pretty good at avoiding laws they didn’t want to follow. Bush did it by telling people, openly, that the CINC could do virtually whatever he wanted in the name of national security. Obama prefers legalistic wordgames: Libya’s not a ‘war,’ it’s a ‘kinetic military action,’ and we’re not engaged in ‘hostilities’ because they can’t shoot back.
So, could Rick Perry gin up some legal cover for jogging strapped? Sure, why not? The president can pretty much always find at least one executive branch lawyer willing to ratify whatever he wants.
If Gov. Perry wanted to use the direct approach of his fellow ex-cheerleader and Texan, George W. Bush, Perry might insist he’s the commander-in-chief, and he has adequate national security reasons for being armed. If he went the Obama route, maybe he’d just insist he was following the law, and, despite all appearances, that the object he was carrying wasn’t actually a gun.
When the State Takes the Children
The New York Times has an article today about how city officials take children away from parents because of marijuana use. Here is an excerpt:
Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.
The article explains that even if a child is not immediately removed a “neglect finding” can kill prospects for certain jobs involving kids, such as a daycare assistant, and will make it easier for judges to order a removal down the road. Even though marijuana use is very common among whites, the neglect and removal cases are mostly brought against minorities.
When drug warriors are challenged about criminalizing marijuana use, they typically deflect the question by saying, “we’re not locking up nonviolent marijuana users.” Well that’s only because our prisons are overflowing already and they can’t convince enough lawmakers to build enough prison space to escalate the war further. Second, below the prison numbers a low scale war continues apace–tens of thousands of arrests and court appointments and, as this article shows, child removal proceedings.
New York should follow California’s approach to this issue–if the state can demonstrate actual harm to children from marijuana use, then a neglect case can be brought. Reporters should ask Mayor Michael Bloomberg whether his past drug use makes him unfit to be a parent or grandparent or to be in an occupation affecting the well-being of kids.
Freedom in Russia
The news out of Russia the past few years has been depressing for believers in liberal democracy. Twenty years ago, it was sometimes said that Russia had put political reform before economic reform, and China had started with economic reform. Many people, following the analysis of Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, thought that China’s path was more likely to lead to the development of a middle class, civil society, and eventually democratic capitalism. And that may yet be the case.
But today, on the 20th anniversary of the attempted communist coup in Russia and Boris Yeltsin‘s victory for democracy, Masha Lipman has some interesting things to say in the Washington Post about the state of freedom in Russia. She says the previous hopes for democracy have been replaced by Vladimir Putin’s “recentralizing power and reinstating state dominance over the people,” leading to a withdrawal of most citizens from political involvement and thus to “increasing corruption, cronyism and lawlessness.” But there’s good news beyond the headlines:
The freedom of individual pursuit — as long as one stays away from politics — is one undoubted achievement of Russia’s post-communist development. Putin’s government reinstated the Soviet-style political monopoly and uncontested governance but did not encroach on individual rights. The constraints that existed in the USSR on entrepreneurship, artistic or academic self-fulfillment and lifestyle were not brought back. If one views the events of August 1991 as people rising in defense of freedom against a communist comeback, today’s individual freedoms should be seen as a goal fulfilled.
Another post-communist achievement is the rise of a consumer society. Although a sizable number of Russians still have low incomes, never has the proportion of those who enjoy reasonable wealth and comfort been so high. During Soviet times, frustrated consumers faced chronic shortages and ubiquitous lines; after August 1991 and the adoption of a market economy, this cause of discontent was eliminated.
These days in Russia, individual freedoms and the developed consumer society are taken for granted.
That’s good news, 20 years after the fall of communism.
U.S. Must Resist Military Role in Post-Qaddafi Libya
After weeks of very little movement either militarily or diplomatically in Libya, there are apparent developments on both fronts in recent days. Rebel forces, aided by NATO’s air support, finally appear to be advancing into western Libya and cutting off supply lines to Tripoli, the long-time stronghold of support for Muammar Qaddafi. And reports are swirling about secret negotiations that might provide a peaceful exit from the country for the aging dictator.
Those developments underscore that U.S. and NATO officials urgently need to consider what strategy they intend to pursue if Qaddafi’s more than four-decade hold on power finally comes to an end. That is more crucial for the leaders of the European members of the alliance, since Libya is located on Europe’s Mediterranean flank, but because the Obama administration unwisely chose to involve the United States in Libya’s internecine conflict by launching air strikes, it has become a pertinent issue for Washington as well.
The outlook for a post-Qaddafi Libya is midpoint between sobering and depressing. It is possible that the warring parties will accept a de facto division of the country between the eastern and western tribes, although a formal agreement to that effect is unlikely. Even an informal partition would more accurately reflect the demographics, politics, and history of that territory than an insistence on keeping Libya intact. Moreover, the most probable alternatives to a peaceful territorial division would be a continuous, simmering civil war or a rebel victory that would merely breed resentment in the western part of the country and pave the way for a new round of fighting a few years from now.
The NATO powers must confront the question of how much they are willing to assist the insurgents in maintaining control of western Libya once Qaddafi is gone. Prospects are not good that a government formed by the eastern-dominated rebel forces would be able to win even a modest number of influential converts from the western tribes. And if the problem of achieving and maintaining political control was not enough of a challenge for the insurgents and their NATO sponsors, there is the matter of repairing the infrastructure damaged in the fighting and replenishing the now largely empty Libyan treasury.
A new government in Tripoli cannot count on oil revenues in the short or medium term to remedy those problems. Experts estimate that it will be at least three years before oil production can return to pre-war levels.
Libya’s probable security and economic difficulties will create tremendous pressure on NATO to provide extensive financial aid and deploy peacekeeping forces. Therein lies the danger to the United States. Logically, if NATO does deploy ground forces, they should come overwhelmingly from France and some of the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Those nations have the most at stake in trying to stabilize Libya. NATO members in central and northern Europe (with the exception of Britain) have shown little desire to engage in such a mission. So far, the Obama administration has indicated that the United States will not put ground forces into Libya —a wise exercise in restraint.
But given the financial woes of Italy, France and other key European members of the alliance, and given the habitual desire of the Europeans to off-load security problems onto the United States as NATO’s leader, it is all too likely that we will see a concerted campaign to get Washington’s participation in a post-Qaddafi peacekeeping mission. The Obama administration should firmly reject such overtures. Washington’s agenda is already more than full with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the NATO nation-building missions in Bosnia and Kosovo provide ample evidence that a similar venture in Libya could prove extremely lengthy, expensive, and frustrating. President Obama should resist any temptation to involve the United States further in Libya’s domestic quarrels.
Supreme Court Should Review Obamacare Case Now
I’m glad Trevor Burrus took the laboring oar in pointing out highlights from an Eleventh Circuit opinion that, as he put it, “is not only exhaustive, it is convincing.” I’ve been swamped with editing the Cato Supreme Court Review and preparing for our Constitution Day conference, so have had little time to put words on paper (or even on screen) after my initial statement.
I did put together one op-ed, however, that ran today in Politico. Here’s an excerpt:
By [striking down the individual mandate], the court — including, for the first time, a judge appointed by a Democratic president — reaffirmed that the Constitution places principled limits on federal power. It rejected the government’s argument for a situational limit on Congress’s regulatory authority based on the idea that health care is “unique,” and somehow different both from other products that everyone consumes (like food, clothing and shelter) and other types of insurance against unpredictable events (like death, disability and natural disasters).
The government’s position failed to sway the court because it did not suggest a constitutional interpretation of the commerce power. Indeed, factors like the inevitability and unpredictability of treatment, the requirement that hospitals treat people with emergency medical conditions and the high cost of advanced care “speak more to the complexity of the problem being regulated than the regulated decision’s relation to interstate commerce. They are not limiting principles, but limiting circumstances.”
I conclude that now that we have two thorough circuit court opinions going in opposite directions, there’s no reason to wait any further: The government should file for, and the Supreme Court should grant, a petition for certiorari (review). Any delay by the government would be base political strategery, an attempt to push the eventual Court decision — whatever it is — past the November 2012 presidential election.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
