Archive for December, 2011
Unconstitutional Patrols and Second Class Citizens
It does not happen in the suburbs, but in the city, the police will sometimes just pounce on people who are not doing anything wrong and if you complain or ‘mouth off,’ things can get much worse. Here is an excerpt from a ruling handed down today in DC.
What is most disturbing about this case is the result: a young man in the community . . . who was engaged in peaceful activities (mowing the lawn, smoking a cigarette) and who the police knew at the time they stopped him was not doing anything unlawful, is approached by aggressive officers engaged in aggressive unconstitutional patrols, and this young man ends up being punched in the face with such force that he receives a black eye, kicked numerous times in the back, thrown on the ground, sprayed in the eyes with pepper spray, and finally, he receives two convictions on his record for assault on a police officer. . . . But for this unconstitutional police policy, appellant Crossland would not have suffered a physical attack on his person and would not have had these convictions on his record. Instead, he would have had a rather ordinary day in his community mowing the lawn and smoking a cigarette, a day he probably wouldn’t even have cause to remember, and it is very disturbing that the police in this case are essentially being rewarded for their unconstitutional behavior and aggressive unconstitutional police policy which was the direct cause of a highly volatile situation which led to this young man’s eventual convictions for assaulting them.
The full opinion can be found here [pdf]. One judge says he hopes the police will be admonished for violating the rights of individuals–aggressively confronting people who are not doing anything wrong–and wonders whether he is being naive and unrealistic. Sorry to say that he is being naive and that’s part of the problem. If the young man had gone along with the illegal stop and frisk and the officer left the scene after ten minutes, there would have been no real legal remedy available and that’s why these tactics are used over and over again.
Author David Shipler spoke about this kinda thing at Cato a few weeks ago. Related Cato work here
Reality, Meet Education Policy. Education Policy, Please, Meet Reality!
Nobody wants to be the guy — especially the Congress-guy — who says that we need to cut education spending. Nobody wants to be the target of attacks from both the well-intentioned and politically opportunistic that they hate children, only care about “the rich,” or any of the other deviousness that long ago snuck up behind reasoned debate, threw a rope around its neck, and pulled it backwards.
That’s been proven again today.
If you address it honestly, it’s nearly impossible to deny that federal education meddling has been not just a failure, but a failure with all sorts of bizzaro tendencies. Just look at today’s big edu-news story: Several months ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned that this year 82 percent of the nation’s public schools would be identified as failing under the No Child left Behind Act. A lot of people smelled pure politics behind the pronouncement — the administration wanted to unilaterally issue waivers from the law in exchange for states adopting POTUS-dictated policies — and today the Center on Education Policy released a report finding that only about 48 percent of schools “need improvement” under NCLB.
Wait, 48 percent? Isn’t that still really high?
It certainly seems so, but who the heck even knows? Every state sets its own standards-and-testing regime and most appear to have gamed the system wildly to stay out of trouble. So are all our schools failing? Half? And what even constitutes failing? No one knows, and few politicians appear willing to talk straight about it. (Of course, most probably have no idea what should constitute math and reading “proficiency” — the law’s goal — to begin with. Indeed, it’s an extremely subjective designation for anyone to make, though some in Washington act like they pretty much know what it is.)
Obviously, no sane individual would ever construct a system like this. But politically, all this illusion and contortion makes sense: Every politician wants to be seen as the savior of our children, but never wants the abuse that would come with creating and enforcing high standards, or being honest about progress made — or not made — under his or her watch. So we get all this sound, fury, and when you compare spending to test scores, educational nothing:
Now, you’d think just the sheer lunacy of federal education policy making would make it clear to all that Washington should get out of education. And if that didn’t do it, the abysmal track record absolutely would. But no: Today the U.S. House of Representatives – the legislative body supposedly full of angry, tea-guzzling Republicans — produced their FY 2012 appropriations bill. And by how much did they cut the U.S. Department of Education budget? 20 percent? 2 percent? No, a microscopic 0.2 percent! A $153 million quark out of a $71.3 billion whale!
While office holders are wrongly considered our leaders by some — they are, in fact, our employees — you’d hope they’d lead a bit by ignoring short-term political consequences and cutting utterly failed programs. But that would be the triumph of hope over reality; politicians are as self-interested as anyone else, and will generally do only those things that help them keep or gain votes. So what must happen is that the public gets intimately familiar with the sick reality of federal education policy and votes based on it. And that means those of us at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, and others who know the truth, must do a better job of getting that word out and helping education policy to finally meet reality.
One-Click Christmas Shopping
The Cato Institute offers lots of great Christmas gifts — Pocket Constitutions (also a good gift for Bill of Rights Day!), books, apparel, even Cato-branded Lands’ End merchandise. But I have my own holiday recommendations that I’ve made before.
I decided one year to give a young colleague a post-graduate course in political science and economics — P. J. O’Rourke’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I decided to try Borders (RIP). But first — to avoid yet more driving around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in stock. Sure enough, they did, in a couple of stores just blocks from the Cato Institute. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or current affairs, they’re humor.
Yes, P.J. is one of the funniest writers around. But what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he is. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern mixed-economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t — than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.
On page 1, P. J. starts with the right question: “Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?” Supply-and-demand curves are all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the time–though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden, Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.
In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes, the real answer is the collective “ujamaa” policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is “ujaama—they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy.”
From Tanzania P. J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds “the best contemporary example of laissez-faire….The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”
You could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy where the texts are Eat the Rich and Parliament of Whores. So, bookstore owners, leave them in the Humorous Writing section for sure, but also put copies in the Economics, Politics, and Current Affairs sections.
Still time to buy them for Christmas and educate all your family and friends while they think they’re just being entertained!
Today Is Bill of Rights Day
Today is Bill of Rights Day. So it’s an appropriate time to consider the state of our constitutional safeguards.
Let’s consider each amendment in turn.
The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” Government officials, however, have insisted that they can gag recipients of “national security letters” and censor broadcast ads in the name of campaign finance reform.
The Second Amendment says the people have the right “to keep and bear arms.” Government officials, however, make it difficult to keep a gun in the home and make it a crime for a citizen to carry a gun for self-protection.
The Third Amendment says soldiers may not be quartered in our homes without the consent of the owners. This safeguard is one of the few that is in fine shape — so we can pause here for a laugh.
The Fourth Amendment says the people have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Government officials, however, insist that they can conduct commando-style raids on our homes and treat airline travelers like prison inmates by conducting virtual strip searches.
The Fifth Amendment says that private property shall not be taken “for public use without just compensation.” Government officials, however, insist that they can use eminent domain to take away our property and give it to other private parties who covet it.
The Sixth Amendment says that in criminal prosecutions, the person accused is guaranteed a right to trial by jury. Government officials, however, insist that they can punish people who want to have a trial—“throwing the book” at those who refuse to plead guilty—which explains why 95 percent of the criminal cases never go to trial.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases where the controversy “shall exceed twenty dollars.” Government officials, however, insist that they can impose draconian fines on people without jury trials.
The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. Government officials, however, insist that a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense is not cruel.
The Ninth Amendment says that the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights should not be construed to deny or disparage others “retained by the people.” Government officials, however, insist that they will decide for themselves what rights, if any, will be retained by the people.
The Tenth Amendment says that the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states, or to the people. Government officials, however, insist that they will decide for themselves what powers they possess, and have extended federal control over health care, crime, education, and other matters the Constitution reserves to the states and the people.
It’s a disturbing snapshot, to be sure, but not one the Framers of the Constitution would have found altogether surprising. They would sometimes refer to written constitutions as mere “parchment barriers,” or what we call “paper tigers.” They nevertheless concluded that having a written constitution was better than having nothing at all.
The key point is this: A free society does not just “happen.” It has to be deliberately created and deliberately maintained. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. To remind our fellow citizens of their responsibility in that regard, the Cato Institute has distributed more than five million copies of our pocket Constitution. At this time of year, it’ll make a great stocking stuffer.
Let’s enjoy the holidays but let’s also resolve to be more vigilant about defending our Constitution. To learn more about Cato’s work in defense of the Constitution, go here. To support the work of Cato, go here.
The Age of Hayek?
Gallup has a new poll that shows “Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level.” The headline might also have been “Fear of Big Business Falls by 20 Percent in 2011.” Or perhaps “Fear of Big Government Has Risen Sharply during the Age of Obama.”
This is not good news for Progressives in general. They need for the government to be trusted, if not loved, to undertake great projects in pursuit of a presumed public good. But the real losers here are Occupy Wall Street. The Gallup survey was done in late November and early December of this year. After several months of attention to OWS, the fear of Big Government has gone up while the fear of Big Business has dropped. OWS is not moving public opinion in its preferred direction.
Does Mandated Disclosure Help Voters?
After the Citizens United decision, mandated disclosure of campaign spending has become the major tool of campaign finance reformers. The Supreme Court has validated forced disclosure as a way to inform voters about candidates. Knowing who supports an advertisement supposedly gives a voter a cue about a candidate’s positions and outlook. If labor unions support a candidate, a voter who supports (opposes) unions can then vote for (vote against) the candidate supported by the union.
David Primo reports on his research showing that voters do not use disclosed information in this way. He also finds that the disclosure process makes it harder to participate in politics.
For some time I have suspected that electoral players want disclosure so they can attack those who fund their speech favoring their opponents. Such attacks presumably make such fund (and such speech) less likely. Disclosure is just a weapon in the ongoing electoral struggle.
The Golden Post-War Years of Government and the Economy?
I spent the afternoon debating, among others, Rick Perlstein, on the economy. The debate was being taped for Aljazeera TV (set to air tonight some time in the 7 pm hour EST). Rick claimed that since both government and the economy were getting bigger between World War II and the 1970, then growing federal expenditures couldn’t be bad for the economy. The economist in me, was thinking, well what does the data say? Obviously we didn’t have the data at hand, so the issue was not explored any further.
I’ve tried to reproduce the core of the question in the graph below, which shows on the left axis federal spending as a share of GNP and on the right axis the real increase in GDP, both measures on a quarterly basis. If the visual trend is not enough for you, the correlation between the two is a negative 0.4. Keeping in mind that correlation isn’t causality, it does appear that as the federal government increased as a percentage of the economy, the growth rate of the economy slowed.
During most of this period federal spending to GNP averaged around 16% (can’t we at least get back to the magical 1960s level of government?), while the annual growth rate in GDP averaged 3.9 percent. I find the pattern starting around 1966 to be particularly interesting as we witnessed both a sharp increase in the size of government and a dramatic fall in the growth rate of the economy. Of course I don’t expect those wedded blindly to a faith in big government to find any of this convincing, but for those of us with an empirical fact-based bent, it does suggest to me that had we restrained the late 1960s growth in government, our economy would be a lot bigger today (but then who cares about the size of the pie when you can fight over the pieces?).
Feds Want To Ban Phone Use — Even Hands-Free — While Driving
For quite a while Obama transportation officials have been campaigning against the safety hazard of “distracted driving,” but they must regard the American public as slow learners, because now the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is proposing something truly radical: a ban on drivers’ use of cellphones and other personal electronic devices even when they’re hands-free and thus don’t require taking anyone’s eyes or hands off the road or steering wheel. The only exceptions the agency would permit would be “emergency” phone use and “devices designed to assist the driving task,” such as GPS devices. NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said the problem is “cognitive” distractions as well as the “visual” and “manual” kind. The agency cannot adopt such a ban directly, but it’s calling on the states to fall into line and to enlist in a campaign of “high-visibility enforcement.”
And there’s more. NTSB is also, to quote PC World, “encouraging electronics manufacturers — via recommendations to the CTIA-The Wireless Association and the Consumer Electronics Association — to develop features that ‘disable the functions of portable electronic devices within reach of the driver when a vehicle is in motion.’” In the perfect Nannyland of the future, your phone will turn itself off when the government wants it to — even if you were in the middle of placing one of those emergency calls (“Honey, get out of the house, the flood waters are rising”) that will supposedly still be permitted.
Tech commentators are blasting the agency for jumping the gun on the evidence, to say nothing of ignoring values of personal liberty. A PC Magazine writer points out that while there is a safety case to be made against texting behind the wheel — a practice that encourages the driver to look away from the road for extended periods — the NTSB is short of statistics (as opposed to scary anecdotes) to show that phone conversation itself is a dire problem. Ars Technica notes that even the board’s own (disputable) statistics link the hazards of “conversation with passengers” to more than twice as many fatal accidents as the hazards of device use — and no one has yet proposed banning passenger conversations with the driver. (Don’t give Washington ideas, though.) Among devices, the sort of touch-screen car entertainment systems that you can fiddle with for ten seconds at a stretch — which are apparently okay with NTSB — would seem to pose considerably more distraction than one-button phone-answering. And speaking of statistics, the Federal Highway Administration website reports the lowest per-mile auto fatality rate ever, and the lowest in absolute numbers since the year 1950 — even though, to quote the NTSB itself, device use has seen “exponential growth” in the past few years.
Something doesn’t add up here. Commercial drivers, since the early-1980s CB radio craze and long before, have been using mobile communications for purposes other than emergencies and driving assistance, and their safety record is not notably atrocious. Hang up on this bad idea now, please.
Newt: Big Government Conservative
I’ve got a piece over at the Daily Caller this morning entitled “Newt’s Constitutional Confusions,” the title of which only hints at the constitutional apostasy to be found in Gingrich’s voluminous 21st Century Contract with America. Section nine, for example, “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution,” is an unvarnished attack on what Newt sees as run-away courts frustrating the will of the people – as if that, and not run-away government, were our main problem today.
In fact, Newt praises Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous 1937 Court-packing threat, after which the Court largely abdicated its responsibility to check the political branches. And he condemns Cooper v. Aaron, the unanimous 1958 Little Rock school desegregation decision (remember the federal troops Eisenhower sent?) in which the Court told state officials they couldn’t “nullify” Supreme Court rulings. Thus his main target is “judicial supremacy,” the idea – implicit in the Constitution, explicit in the Federalist, and secured in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison – that it falls to the Supreme Court, not to the political branches, to say finally what the law is.
But in making that argument, he completely misreads the decisions. (In Kelo v. New London, his very first example of a willful judiciary, the Court wrongly upheld the city’s transfer of Ms. Kelo’s property to a private developer!) He misreads the Federalist. He relies on Leftist critics of the Rehnquist Court’s modest efforts at reviving enumerated powers federalism. And most important, politically, he’s misleading the Tea Party folks, most of whom stand for restoring limited constitutional government. Indeed, the Tea Party people hope to see an engaged Court overturn ObamaCare, just in case Newt – or better, someone who understands the Constitution – doesn’t win in November.
Border Apprehensions Down. Will Our Politicians Notice?
Apprehensions along America’s southwest border have plunged in the past decade. Although there have been plenty of stories about it this week, our politicians have yet to grasp this important fact.
From a peak in 2000, the annual number of arrests along our 2,000 mile border with Mexico has plunged by more than 75 percent. Apprehensions are considered a good although imperfect proxy for attempted border crossings. By any measure, the number of people trying to enter the United States illegally between ports of entry has dropped to its lowest level since comparable records began 40 years ago.
A few implications that are not being talked about enough by politicians of either party:
- For those who demand that we must “get control of our borders first” before discussing real immigration reform, that excuse is more hollow than ever. Net migration from Mexico right now is “essentially zero,” according to Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. This is a political window of opportunity to change our immigration system.
- Immigration reform should be seen as an essential step in reducing illegal traffic across the border. As I’ve noted before, when we have expanded legal immigration in the past, illegal immigration has dropped. The best way to control our border is to expand opportunities for workers from Latin America to enter our country legally through established ports of entry.
- We are in no danger of being flooded by low-skilled immigrants. Yes, beefed up enforcement has played a role in the declining numbers entering illegally, but the economic downturn explains most of the drop off. The Great Recession hit illegal immigrants hard, especially in the construction industry. If the jobs are not available, fewer foreign-born workers come and more go home.
- Conditions in Mexico are improving. Despite bad press about the drug war, staying home has become relatively more attractive for Mexican workers. Thanks to gradual economic reforms, including trade liberalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican economy has enjoyed stable if unspectacular growth. The middle class is growing and poverty is declining. That growth, in turn, has contributed to a plunge in the Mexican birthrate, to where today it has fallen to replacement level.
We should reform our immigration system now. When the U.S. economy recovers to more normal levels of job creation, we will need immigrant workers more than ever. We should be prepared to welcome them legally rather than wasting resources in a futile effort to “control the border” through enforcement only.
Senator Schumer’s Feeble Grasp of Fiscal History
I’m not a big fan of Senator Schumer of New York. As I’ve noted before, he’s a doctrinaire statist who wants the government to have control over just about every aspect of our lives.
But that describes a lot of people in Washington. I guess what also bothers me is his willingness to say anything, regardless of how divorced it is from reality, to advance his short-run political agenda (sort of a Democrat version of Karl Rove).
For example, here’s part of what the Empire State Senator recently had to say about fiscal policy, as reported by a Washington Post columnist.
Schumer said, “…Republicans came in and said, `We can solve your problem by shrinking government’…We tried their theory…The American people resent government paralysis, but most of them would say that government is doing too little to help them, not too much.”
What’s remarkable about this statement is that it’s so inaccurate that we can’t even decipher what he means. I’ve come up with three possible interpretations of what he might have been trying to say, and they’re all wrong.
1. He’s referring to GOP actions this year. This interpretation might make partial sense because the House Republicans have made a few semi-serious efforts to shrink government, but how can Schumer say “we tried their theory” when every Republican initiative was blocked by the Senate and Obama?
The Ryan budget died of malign neglect since the Senate didn’t even bother to produce a budget, and Republican efforts on the 2011 spending levels and the debt limit also were stymied, resulting at best in kiss-your-sister deals.
2. He’s referring to GOP actions during the Bush Administration. This interpretation might make some sense because the GOP did control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, but does Schumer understand that “shrinking government” was not part of the Republican agenda during those years?
But don’t believe me. The numbers from the Historical Tables of the Budget unambiguously show that the federal budget almost doubled during the Bush years because of huge increases in domestic spending.
3. He’s referring to GOP actions during the 1990s. This interpretation actually does make sense because the burden of the public sector did shrink as a share of GDP during the Clinton years when Republicans controlled Congress, so it would be accurate to say “we tried their theory.”
But what was so bad about the era of spending restraint during the 1990s? The economy expanded and people were better off, in large part because, to quote Schumer, government was “doing too little to help them.”
Heck, the Clinton-GOP Congress years were so good that I even offered, during a debate on national TV, to go back to Clinton’s higher tax rates if it meant we also could undo all the reckless spending of the Bush-Obama years.
This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring about low marginal tax rates. It just means that I understand that the ultimate tax is the burden of the public sector. This video explains more, in case you’re wondering why I’d like to go back to the 1990s.
It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyhow) that it would be even better to combine Clinton’s spending levels with Reagan’s tax rates.
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