Archive for December, 2011
Ed. Policy Reality Check (Now with More Reality!)
The Orlando Sentinel published an article over the weekend titled “Education: Big reforms haven’t yet produced big results.” It seems to have been meant as a reality check, and certainly it does contain a few relevant facts, but it also leaves this statement from “critics” unchallenged: “schools won’t get better without more money.”
Slight problem: Florida’s k-12 scholarship tax credit is raising academic achievement at less than half the per pupil cost of the traditional state-run schools. That’s according to academic studies commissioned by the state of Florida and by the state’s own spending and enrollment data.
Figlio and Hart, 2010, found that the scholarship tax credit program improves academic performance in public schools; and Figlio, 2011, found that students using the scholarships to attend independent schools are also benefiting academically. As for cost, the average scholarship is about $4,000. For comparison, the state’s public school districts spent $27 billion in 2009-10 (bottom of page 21, first column), for 2.6 million students, for per pupil spending of just over $10,000.
Revised DSM-5 Could Open Up Wider Legal Claims
The American Psychiatric Association is revising its highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, currently known as DSM-IV (the fifth version will be “DSM-V” or, since a switch to Arabic numbering is planned, “DSM-5″). Nearly 8,000 persons have signed a petition, sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Psychology, Division 32 of the American Psychological Association, which challenges the revision’s proposed widening of the definitions of mental disorder. The letter associated with the petition warns that the revision proposes to lower diagnostic thresholds for many categories of disorder without good reason, as well as introducing new constructs such as “Internet Addiction Disorder” that have “no basis in the empirical literature.” The expansion could lead to inappropriate medical treatment as well as other ill effects.
David Foley at Labor Related spells out some of the legal implications for the workplace:
Among others, the changes in the DSM-V could impact Americans with Disabilities Act claims (is the plaintiff disabled, what is a reasonable accommodation, etc), Family Medical Leave Act claims (does plaintiff suffer from a serious illness) and workers compensation laws (does plaintiff have an illness and was it caused by work).
Introducing a new category of Mild Neurocognitive Disorder, for example, could entitle workers to begin claiming job-related accommodation for cognitive deficits often associated with advancing age — perhaps especially significant since federal law has made it unlawful for most private employers to set policies of automatic retirement at any particular age. As Foley notes, the task force is also planning to reduce the diagnostic threshold for two disabilities that generate many ADA claims already: Attention Deficit Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
Employers already face serious legal risks under existing law if they decline to accommodate employees with mental and behavioral deficits (which may include substance abuse, at least if the worker has entered rehab). As I noted the other day at Overlawyered, a hotel chain has agreed to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic front desk clerk rather than working with a state-paid “job coach” to remedy his deficiencies. The EEOC sued an insurance company that rescinded a job offer as an agent to an applicant after he tested positive for methadone. An Iowa jury awarded $1.1 million against a university for failing to accommodate an employee’s request for a lighter work load and other changes after she was diagnosed with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. And HR lawyers have warned employers that administering personality tests to new workers could violate the law by improperly revealing protected conditions such as “paranoid personality disorder.”
Earlier posts on the ADA and mental/behavioral deficits here (trucking firm sued for avoiding drivers with drinking history), here and here.
Drug War Update
When a war is not going well, one response is to escalate. There has been a lot of escalation in the drug war. Here are two recent examples:
1. Federal agent loses his job for questioning the wisdom of the drug war. Some government officials do not like the fact that the group “Law Enforcement Against Prohibition” (LEAP) has a growing membership.
2. Police agents tell judge in a warrant application that DVDs that educate citizens about their constitutional rights make certain organizations suspicious. Really. Since the film in question, “10 Rules for Dealing with the Police” premiered at Cato, maybe undercover officers are now attending our events. Neill Franklin, executive director of LEAP, spoke at Cato about the 10 Rules educational DVD and he says that film ought to be used in police training–to show agents how to respect the constitutional rights of people in the community.
Ethan Nadelmann recently spoke at Cato on the prospects for drug policy reform. And the NYT had a good piece on the militarization of police tactics yesterday.
For more Cato work on drug policy, go here.
Will You Be Able to Protect Your Family if Politicians Destabilize Society?
About a week ago, I wrote that people in western nations need the freedom to own guns just in case there are riots, chaos, and social disarray when welfare states collapse.
Much to my surprise and pleasure, this resulted in an invitation to appear on the National Rifle Association’s webcast to discuss the issue.
As I noted in the interview, I’m just a fiscal policy wonk, but the right to keep and bear arms should be a priority for anyone who believes in freedom and responsibility. And even though I only have a couple of guns, you can see that I’m raising my kids to have a proper appreciation for the Second Amendment.
I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we suffer societal breakdown, but I won’t be too surprised if it happens in some European countries. We’ve already seen the challenges faced by disarmed Brits during recent riots in the United Kingdom.
In the NRA interview, I pointed out that law enforcement is one of the few legitimate functions of government, so it is utterly despicable when politicians fail to fulfill that responsibility and also deprive households from having the ability to protect themselves.
Last but not least, watch this video if you want to be inspired about protecting the Second Amendment. Pay close attention around the five-minute mark.
Consumer Finance Nominee Cordray to Get Floor Vote?
Rumor is that Richard Cordray might just get a vote on his nomination to head the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), created by the Dodd-Frank Act. Full Senate vote could come as early as Wednesday.
Given that 44 Republican Senators have said they will oppose his nomination, cloture on the motion to proceed seems likely to fail, dooming the vote. But as Bloomberg makes clear, this vote isn’t about protecting consumers, it is about protecting President Obama’s job.
The President plans to use the vote to argue that Republicans are hacks for Wall Street, while he fights for the middle class. Of course he never mentions that the new agency does NOT even cover Wall Street, which remains under the Securities and Exchange Commission. And if he is being so tough on banks, then why is his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner going around saying that having Cordray in place would be good for banks? Which exactly is it? But then the fact that Geithner is still Treasury Secretary offers plenty evidence on who is really the “front” for Wall Street.
The CFPB already has plenty of power to go after banks. What it lacks is expanded authority over non-banks. For some bizarre reason Geithner believes it was check-cashiers and payday lenders behind the financial crisis. But then such a belief goes a long way in explaining his failed performance as NY Fed President.
I’ve written elsewhere on the structural changes Republicans are asking for, which would add some transparency and accountability to the new agency. Republicans are right to fight for these changes, using the only leverage they have. So far Republicans have only focused on the agency itself, saying little about Cordray. Even if Republicans were successful getting their changes, they should still question Cordray. During his thankfully short political career, Cordray showed himself to be a reliable friend of the trial bar. His nomination exposes what the CFPB has been really about all along: lining the pockets of the trial bar.
Did We Have Music, Art, and Books before the UN?
And would we have music, art, and books without the UN? The great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock suggests in a Washington Post op-ed that our cultural life would be barren without UNESCO:
I cannot imagine a world without music, art, film, dance, theater and books. It would be a dreary and colorless existence, with little cooperation and communication among citizens. The arts are the glue that holds us together, the cultural fabric of our lives, and they sow the seeds for inventive, universally shared experiences….
UNESCO helps ensure that our world remains soulful, spirited and full of life.
Case in point: UNESCO recently endorsed April 30 as International Jazz Day. This is an opportunity to spread the gospel of jazz, its message of peace and cooperation, and its unique American traits. …
Music is an essential ingredient of my life, and I am in awe of its power….
That is why U.S. engagement in UNESCO and the United Nations must continue….
During these crucial times, the work of UNESCO is needed more than ever.
Herbie Hancock is a great pianist and composer. But here he seems to have let UNESCO bureaucrats lead him into a ridiculous argument. Ridiculous enough to remind one of Hillary Clinton, who said when Republicans threatened to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, ”This is an ominous time for those of us who care for the arts in America. A misguided, misinformed effort to eliminate public support for the arts not only threatens irrevocable damage to our cultural institutions but also to our sense of ourselves and what we stand for as a people.” Oh, come on. The arts are a lot more important in our lives than anything that the NEA and UNESCO do. And they get far more “public support” than these modest government expenditures.
Supporters of government arts spending produce economic studies finding that nonprofit arts and culture institutions spend $63 billion a year. Americans donate $13 billion a year to arts and culture organizations. And of course those numbers are dwarfed by American spending on for-profit cultural activities: $443 billion in 2010 on entertainment and media, $28 billion on books.
Compared to such numbers, the National Endowment for the Arts’ annual budget of about $150 million and whatever portion of UNESCO’s $325 million annual budget is spent on arts are pocket change. If both of them disappeared, music, art, film, dance, theater and books would continue to thrive.
Obama’s Top 10 Constitutional Violations
That’s the topic of my latest op-ed, in the Daily Caller. Here’s the list:
- The individual mandate
- Medicaid coercion
- The Independent Payment Advisory Board
- The Chrysler bailout
- Dodd-Frank
- The deep-water drilling ban
- Political-speech disclosure for federal contractors
- Taxing political contributions
- Graphic tobacco warnings
- Health care waivers
For descriptions of what makes these things so constitutionally bad, read the whole thing.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:
- I argue that we don’t need a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.
- Thoughts on the “Tea Party Budget.”
- The 21st Century Postal Service Act would keep the U.S. Postal Service stuck in the 20th century.
- If Congress is intent on cutting payroll taxes, it should do so within the context of long-run fiscal reforms.
- Republicans who say they want smaller government should walk the talk by introducing legislation that would eliminate agencies and programs.
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Ninth Circuit Gets It Right, Deregulates the Bone Marrow Market
This blogpost was coauthored by Cato legal associate Chaim Gordon.
Thanks to the Institute for Justice, those suffering from leukemia and various other ailments that require them to wait for a bone marrow match to miraculously appear have new hope. Yesterday’s unanimous opinion by the Ninth Circuit in Flynn v. Holder effectively deregulates the bone-marrow market—and may even encourage lawmakers to rethink the disastrous federal prohibition on compensating organ donors. (I previously wrote about the case here and here, and you can watch Cato’s forum on it here.)
At issue here is the National Organ Transplant Act, which prohibits patients from compensating would-be donors of life sustaining organs. The Ninth Circuit ruled that NOTA does not apply to blood (or blood subparts), and so it is entirely legal to sell bone marrow stem cells if those cells are extracted from the blood—as they are in 70% of donations—instead of from the bone marrow itself.
Unfortunately, the Ninth Circuit rejected IJ’s argument that Congress has no legitimate authority to interfere with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment. In rejecting this argument, the court effectively held that NOTA’s ban on the sale of actual bone marrow was constitutional because an unregulated market posed certain dangers (especially of the exploitation of desperate patients).
It is highly unlikely that such exploitation could occur under current market conditions, however, because donors and patients have no way of contacting each other without the National Registry system that matches them. And, of course, the choice is not between a prohibition on compensation and complete non-regulation; some regulation may be appropriate, whether by legislation or simple action of the common law akin to how it operates to prevent extortion in other contexts.
The good news is that, with the bone marrow market effectively deregulated, Congress may now be motivated to reexamine its misguided ban on compensating organ donors. One of the greatest obstacles to reforming the prohibition on organ sales is the fortunate fact that relatively few Americans require organ transplants in any given election cycle. According to government statistics, 112,546 Americans are currently on some kind of organ transplant waiting list. That means only around 1 in 3,000 Americans (and their families and friends) would be seriously motivated to demand organ transplant reform from Congress. Congress will now be forced to grapple with its policies regarding bone marrow transplants, which may be an opportune time for advocates to push for wider organ transplant reform.
The Ninth Circuit’s opinion also clears the way for Supreme Court review of NOTA. If this case reaches the high court, IJ can press its constitutional arguments more forcefully. And even if the Supreme Court merely affirms the Ninth Circuit’s opinion on statutory grounds, we will inevitably learn much about the justices’ views on the constitutionality of NOTA more broadly.
For the moment, Flynn v. Holder means that, for the first time in over 25 years, a spotlight has been shined on NOTA and its disastrous effects on Americans’ medical liberty. And that is why the Ninth Circuit’s narrow bone marrow opinion may actually be a significant step toward the rational regulation of organ markets.
For more of Cato’s work in this area, see, for example, this paper and this op-ed.
Revisiting the ‘Christmas Tree Tax’
Three weeks ago, a national commotion erupted when the Drudge Report headlined a story from the Heritage Foundation on the Obama administration’s implementation of a new tax on Christmas trees. I noted here that the 1996 legislation enabling the U.S. Department of Agriculture to implement the tax received most of its support from Republicans, including co-sponsor John Boehner.
The National Taxpayers Union gives a tidy explanation of how the law almost led to the “Christmas Tree Tax”:
The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 permitted producers of agricultural commodities such as beef, pork, or popcorn to create what are known as research and promotion programs, or “checkoffs.” These are analogous to unions: producers pay “dues” to the checkoff which works to fund research and advertising efforts on behalf of the industry represented. Board members are appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture who also has authority to enforce dues-payment. Because the dues are government-coerced, they are essentially taxes passed on to consumers.
There are currently 18 checkoff programs. And while the Obama administration quickly stopped the Christmas tree tax checkoff program from going into effect, there are still other agricultural commodity groups, such as the hardwood lumber industry, pushing for their own checkoff. There are also efforts to allow the creation of non-agricultural commodity checkoffs.
NTU notes that now another Republican wants to create a similar scheme at the Department of Commerce:
Housing Will Be the Last to Recover
The New York Times’ Floyd Norris repeats the same old tired argument that if only we could get the housing market going, everything would be swell. Maybe that works if somehow you believe our objective is to get back to 2005.
Don’t get me wrong; 2005 felt great in terms of the economy. But it was a BUBBLE, driven by false and misplaced beliefs about housing prices (not to mention lots of easy credit). The result? We built more housing than we now need or want. Norris never gets around to explaining how exactly building more housing would solve our current problem of oversupply.
Norris’ solution? Yes, the same tired, old proposal of writing down mortgage debt. Again, nowhere does he explain how forgiving mortgage debt helps to clear the oversupply of housing—because it doesn’t. As I argued before, the notion that forced mortgage write-downs creates wealth, and hence increases spending, is false. But why let facts get in the way of a blind devotion to theft as a manner of creating wealth?
The solution is not to hope our housing market turns around (if you actually want to, try these). Counter to Norris’ bias against markets, letting prices fall and the market clear is the most workable path to fixing the housing market. The real solution to getting our economy moving is helping to transition resources out of housing and into other sectors of the economy, where they can be used to create real wealth and not simply to bid up house prices. I cannot envision a situation where we put more than half of the 2 million unemployed constructions workers back to work in residential construction any time soon. Ain’t going to happen.
I particularly find these positions most puzzling when they come from the Left. We’ve had a decade of stagnant wages. Why? Because we invested in running up asset (house) prices, rather than investing in capital (plant and equipment), which would have increased labor productivity and ultimately wages. Running up house prices does not increase wages or benefit the working class. It’s just a horrible form of regressive theft that benefits those with assets (houses) at the expense of those without.
This Week at Libertarianism.org
The day after Thanksgiving didn’t see one of these updates, so we’ve got two weeks of new content at Libertarianism.org to cover.
George H. Smith continued his Excursions series with the first two parts in an extended look at the Declaration of Independence. In part 1, Smith discussed the intellectual history behind the document’s famous reference to “unalienable” rights. In part 2, he turned to two instances of curious wording: the use of “self-evident” and the lack of “property” in Jefferson’s list of inalienable rights.
We had a few new videos, too. In an addition to our “Libertarian View” series, Penn Jillette—magician and H. L. Menken research fellow at the Cato Institute—talks about what he sees as the important distinction between trying to convince someone that what you believe is true and just stating sincerely what you believe.
On November 29, we posted our first talk from Thomas Szasz. Speaking in 1994, the famous psychiatry skeptic addressed the problem of socialism in health care—an issue very much with us today.
And just today, we added a talk by Roger Garrison on monetary policy and central banking.
Finally, we had an extended—and ongoing—debate in the Free Thoughts blog between Julian Sanchez and Miles Pope on conceptions of morality in Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea.
As always, there’s much more at Libertarianism.org. Keep up to date with everything new on the site by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
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