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Was There a Libertarian Golden Age?
Recently I wrote an article arguing that there never was a golden age of liberty and that in particular libertarians should not hail 19th-century America as a small-government paradise, at least not without grappling with the massive problem of slavery. Jacob Hornberger, author of an article that I criticized, responded in Reason, and I then responded here. Meanwhile, an interesting discussion took place on a email list of libertarian scholars, and I’m pleased to have gotten the permission of several participants to include some of that discussion here:
The Return of Dan Coats
Former Indiana senator Dan Coats is running for his old seat again, 12 years after he left Congress and turned the seat over the now-retiring Evan Bayh. Coats says he’s very concerned that “our elected officials in Washington continue to run up massive deficits, recklessly borrowing and spending record amounts of taxpayer money with no regard for the future generations of Americans who will inherit this staggering and ever-increasing debt,” and he has the support of conservative congressional leader Mike Pence. But I remember a Senator Dan Coats who enthusiastically promoted big, paternalist government. In the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, I responded to a Coats essay on his “Project for American Renewal,” launched with Bill Bennett, this way:
Coats says that the Project for American Renewal “is not a government plan to rebuild civil society” and that he favors “a radical form of devolution [that] would redistribute power directly to families, grass-roots community organizations, and private and religious charities.” But in practice he apparently believes that the federal government should tax American citizens, bring their money to Washington, and then dole it out to sensible state and local programs and responsible private institutions. Surely we have learned that government grants do not create strong, creative, vibrant private organizations. Rather, organizations that depend on government funding will have to follow government rules, will be unable to respond effectively to changing needs, and will get caught up in games of grantsmanship and bureaucratic empire-building.
Moreover, nearly every one of his bills would further entangle the federal government in the institutions of civil society. Under the Role Model Academy Act, the federal government would “establish an innovative residential academy for at-risk youth.” Under the Mentor Schools Act, the feds would provide grants to school districts wanting to develop and operate “same gender” schools. The Character Development Act would give school districts demonstration grants to work with community groups to develop mentoring programs. The Family Reconciliation Act would “provide additional federal funding . . . to implement a waiting period and pre-divorce counseling” for couples with children.
Many of these bills are intended to address real problems, such as the effects of divorce on children and the terrible plight of children trapped in fatherless, crime-ridden, inner-city neighborhoods. But why is it appropriate or effective for the federal government to intrude into these problems? Surely local school districts should decide whether to build same-sex schools or residential academies for at-risk youth; and if the people of, say, Detroit decide that such options would make sense, any theory of responsible, accountable government would suggest that the local city council or school board both make that decision and raise the funds to carry it out.
Many of Coats’s bills deal with symptoms — they try to reform public housing by setting aside units for married couples or to provide mentors for children without fathers — rather than dealing with the real problem, a welfare system that guarantees every teenager her choice of an abortion or an apartment if she gets pregnant. Some of the bills accept the federal Leviathan as a given and tinker with it — for instance, by requiring that every federal dollar spent on family planning be matched by another dollar spent on abstinence education and adoption services. Others just follow the failed liberal policy of handing out federal dollars for whatever Congress thinks is a good idea — school choice, restitution to crime victims, maternity homes, community crime-watch programs.
Over the past 60 years, we’ve watched the federal government intrude more and more deeply into our lives. We’ve seen well-intentioned government programs become corrupted by the ideologues and bureaucrats placed in charge. We’ve seen schools and charities get hooked on federal dollars. The nature of government doesn’t change when it is charged with carrying out conservative social engineering rather than liberal social engineering.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Senate Health Bill May Violate First Amendment
Today, the Cato Institute released “Scientific Misconduct: The Manipulation of Evidence for Political Advocacy in Health Care and Climate Policy,” by George Avery of Purdue University.
Avery points to a troubling provision of the Senate-passed health care bill that Democrats are trying to get through the House:
In a section creating a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct comparative-effectiveness research, the bill allows the withholding of funding to any institution where a researcher publishes findings not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence,” a vague authorization that creates a tremendous tool that can be used to ensure self-censorship and conformity with bureaucratic preferences….As AcademyHealth notes, “Such language to restrict scientific freedom is unprecedented and likely unconstitutional.”
He warns that government bureaucrats aren’t likely to let that power go unused.
In July 2007, AcademyHealth, a professional association of health services and health policy researchers, published results of a study of sponsor restrictions on the publication of research results. Surprisingly, the results revealed that more than three times as many researchers had experienced problems with government funders related to prior review, editing, approval, and dissemination of research results. In addition, a higher percentage of respondents had turned down government sponsorship opportunities due to restrictions than had done the same with industrial funding. Much of the problem was linked to an “increasing government custom and culture of controlling the flow of even non-classified information.”
Avery observes that such power enables bureaucrats to engage in “data manipulation to cover inconvenient findings,” much as the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia appear to have done. Indeed, he points to evidence of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials suppressing an, ahem, inconvenient internal debate.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Energy and Environment; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Kerr Defends the Third-Party Doctrine
Orin Kerr is a law professor at George Washington University and a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy. He is a thoughtful, open-minded legal scholar, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he reliably sides with law enforcement on Fourth Amendment issues.
He recently posted a draft article defending the third-party doctrine, which is an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment holding that a person sharing information with a third party cannot make a Fourth Amendment claim to protection of that information. Use an ISP to transmit your email? No Fourth Amendment protection for its contents. Have a bank account? No Fourth Amendment protection for your banking records. Etc.
He treats as similar two issues that I see as separate: revelations gleaned from informants/agents and from business records. I have always thought of the third-party doctrine as being about business records. My remarks here apply to that area only.
I think the third-party doctrine was never right, and that it grows more wrong with each step forward in modern, connected living. Incredibly deep reservoirs of information are constantly collected by third-party service providers today. Cellular telephone networks pinpoint customers’ locations throughout the day through the movement of their phones. Internet service providers maintain copies of huge swaths of the information that crosses their networks, tied to customer identifiers. Search engines maintain logs of searches that can be correlated to specific computers and usually the individuals that use them. Payment systems record each instance of commerce, and the time and place it occurred. The third-party doctrine exempts law enforcement from the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness and warrant requirements when it looks at these records.
It’s wonderfully contrarian to run against the grain and defend the third-party doctrine, which has plenty of detractors, but sometimes contrarians can be wrong. I think Professor Kerr is, and here I’ll briefly lay out a few of the fundamental differences I have with his paper—all toward the end of perfecting it before it’s published in the Michigan Law Review next year, of course!
Filed under: Cato Publications; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
A Checkered Present
The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn recently responded to Neal McCluskey’s review of his new book. Let’s compare what Finn has to say with reality:
Finn: “You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works.”
Reality: Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom publishes and summarizes an extensive body of empirical research from the U.S. and abroad (.pdf). We also eschew animal breeding terms when describing those with whom we disagree.
Finn: “the CATO crowd [is] indistinguishable nowadays from the ’separation of school and state crowd’”
Reality: Cato’s Center for Educational freedom recently published the Public Education Tax Credit model legislation. The Alliance for Separation of School and State opposes all state involvement in education.
Finn: “the CATO crowd… basically doesn’t believe in any form of public education”
Reality: As explained in Adam Schaeffer’s Public Education Tax Credit paper, we distinguish between the institution of state-run public schooling and the ideals of public education (universal access to good schools, preparation for both participation in public life and success in private life, that schools should encourage harmonious relations among different ethnic and religious groups). We are ardent critics of “public schooling” precisely because it has proven itself so disastrously incapable of delivering public education.
Finn: “They believe in…”
Reality: We are not in the belief business. Our policy recommendations are grounded in domestic, international, and historical evidence regarding the best ways of meeting the public’s educational needs and aspirations.
Finn: “… private education, purchased in the marketplace by parents who want and can afford it for their kids from schools that are not accountable to anybody for anything except keeping those tuition payments rolling in the door.”
Reality: If Finn were familiar with the international evidence on the operation of education markets, he would know that fee-paying parents hold schools more effectively accountable for the quality of educational services than do government bureaucrats.
Finn: “They believe… [t]he heck with everybody else’s kids. The heck with an educated polity or transmitted common culture. Check out Neil [sic] McCluskey’s review of my book.”
Reality: Our model Public Education Tax Credit legislation would ensure universal access to the education marketplace while delivering a far higher quality and far more individually personalized education. And as I pointed out in my book Market Education, education markets have proven themselves perfectly capable of transmitting common culture. The classical Athenians, who not only transmitted but invented much of the Western culture Mr. Finn values, had no government education standards or government schools. Surely Mr. Finn’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, taught him something of classical Greece? And even if Mr. Finn was absent during such lessons, surely he has come across a few of the 120 million McGuffey’s Readers printed during the 19th century while browsing New England’s used bookstores? Long before the rise of vast state school bureaucracies, the private sector was busily transmitting common culture all by itself. More than that, we have documented how state-run schooling Balkanizes American communities by forcing everyone to support a single official education system — a problem that Finn’s national standards would worsen.
And, finally, it is precisely because we do care about everyone’s kids that we recommend real market reform in education, and urge Americans to move past the calcified school monopoly that has so cruelly shortchanged so many children.
Any time that Mr. Finn would care to publicly debate these issues, either in person or in print, we will be happy to dispel his misapprehensions more thoroughly. Given that he recently declined just such an invitation from us, his acceptance of this one would be a pleasant surprise.
“A Cause Greater”
John McCain courted controversy recently with a new campaign slogan that some saw as a thinly veiled attack on Barack Obama’s eclectic background and upbringing. I don’t know if that interpretation is right, but McCain’s new tagline sounds like something out of Team America or Steven Colbert: “The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For” (And So Can You!).
Less ridiculous, and perhaps more unsettling, are McCain’s repeated appeals to “a cause greater than self-interest,” and his attacks on “cynicism,” which, as a determined cynic, I take very personally.
In his speeches, McCain periodically sneers at American opulence and suggests that leaving Americans alone to pursue their own visions of happiness is a narrow and ignoble goal for government. As I point out in my new book The Cult of the Presidency, that’s a common sentiment among the American intelligentsia, and one that’s been used repeatedly to concentrate power in the executive branch:
Like intellectuals the world over, many American pundits and scholars, right and left, view bourgeois contentment with disdain. Normal people appear to like “normalcy,” Warren Harding’s term for peace and prosperity, just fine. But all too many professional thinkers look out upon 300 million people living their lives by their own design and see something impermissibly hollow in the spectacle.
McCain’s campaign speeches reflect that theme. Here he is in a recent speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, telling his audience that if you “sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, [you'll] invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.” Here he is on his campaign webpage, insisting that “each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our own self-interest.”
I’m not a Randian, so I’m not inclined to condemn this stuff as whim-worshipping altruism. In the abstract, I agree with the statement that when you turn away from your own self-interest, narrowly construed, and adopt a higher purpose than your own pleasure (which purpose need not, and ought not, have anything to do with service to the state), you’re likely to end up a happier person. But why is any of this McCain’s business? The president is supposed to be a limited constitutional officer, not a national life coach-cum-self-help guru.
Making the case for “a cause greater” in the Naval Academy speech, McCain declared that
when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.
Oh my, not “designer coffee”! The reflexive contempt for peace and prosperity McCain displays here is the essence of National Greatness Conservatism, and, as Matt Welch has pointed out in Myth of a Maverick, his devastating critique of the Arizona senator, John McCain is to National Greatness Conservatism as Barry Goldwater was to conservatism proper: the electoral standard bearer for the philosophy.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Does America Need a Training School for Bureaucrats?
Investor’s Business Daily comments on Hillary Clinton’s proposal for a national school to train “public servants.” But does America need a West Point for bureaucrats? The IBD editorial touches on some of the obvious shortcomings of the scheme, but it also is worth noting that such a school sounds frighteningly similar to France’s infamous l’Ecole d’Administration, the elitist institution that produced a long string of statist politicians such as Jacques Chirac:
Sen. Hillary Clinton says she wants to establish a national academy that will train public servants. Why do re-education camps come to mind? … Somehow we doubt there will be many lectures in making government smaller, deregulating business, cutting taxes or increasing individual freedom. Is there a chance that this “new generation” attending the academy will hear a single voice that isn’t hailing the glories of the nanny state? Will students being groomed for public service ever hear the names Hayek, von Mises or Friedman during their studies? … Government at all levels is already overflowing with bureaucrats who suck up taxpayers’ money and produce little, if anything, of economic value. More often, the bureaucracy actually gets in the way of economic progress.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Government and Politics
What’s So Special About a Steel Cage Match?
I don’t know how many people reading this are professional wrestling fans – I’m not one – but I would imagine even people who hate wrestling are familiar with the vaunted “steel cage match,” in which the combatants are not only put in the ring together, but the ring is encased in a cage of steel. Wrestling fans love these things. Why?
This description from WWE Bloodbath: Wrestling’s Most Incredible Steel Cage Matches might make it clear:
The steel cage: It’s used as a barrier and as a weapon. It keeps the competitors inside and the interference outside. The Steel Cage Match is the most brutal form of confrontation.
So why’s a steel cage match such a big deal? Because without the cage the Hulkster or Rowdy Roddy might choose not to fight. With it, they have no choice.
OK, so what does any of this have to do with public policy, you ask?
Well, yesterday Sara Mead over at The Quick and the Ed wrote about the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public school focusing on Arabic language and culture that the New York City Department of Education is trying to put in the same building as P.S. 282, a traditional public school. Opposition to the plan has been fierce, with objections ranging from concerns by P.S. 282 parents about losing space and services if they’re forced to share room with Khalil Gibran, to accusations that the academy will be a madrassa.
Here’s the passage in Mead’s post that really troubled me:
The most radical and evangelistic school choice supporters like to argue that choice will reduce social conflict around education because people who want schools to serve different social purposes can send their kids to different schools. But this ignores the fact that the mere existence of certain types of schools is offensive to some people, all the more so if those schools get public funding (and, yes, vouchers or tax expenditures in the form of tax credits are public funding). To the extent that greater choice leads to a greater diversity of educational options, we’re going to be seeing more controversy and conflict over these issues–at least in the near term–not less.
Mead’s conclusion makes little sense. For one thing, the history of education, which I lay out in the paper to which Mead links, makes clear that when choice has been allowed to work, it has helped to cool conflict where it has existed, and avoid it where it hasn’t. Government schooling, in contrast, has forced – and continues to force – regular confrontation. Moreover, logic suggests that defusing conflict would be by far the most likely outcome of choice, because with it no one has to fight. Sure, with choice people might fight more about specific schools because there will be a much greater variety of schools in existence, but the overall conflict will greatly decrease. Making this latter point clear is where wrestling comes in.
You see, the difference between education with choice and education without it is like the difference between a regular wrestling ring and a steel cage. With the former, people who have different values, educational goals, etc., might grapple over their differences – in a free society we are, after all, allowed to tell people that we don’t like them or what they are doing – but groups that are at odds with each other can get out of the ring. With the latter, in contrast, there’s no escape. People have to fight.
Of course, how choice is delivered will dictate how high or inflexible the ropes are on the non-cage ring. For instance, a voucher would still force one person to pay for part of another’s educational choices, making it hard for the two to get completely away from each other. A tax credit letting people choose whose education they’d support, however, would offer much more separation.
Unfortunately, Mead uses a situation that involves almost no choice to tar even the freest choice forms, which might explain her irrational conclusion that choice will, at least in the short run, create more conflict than the status quo. The Khalil Gibran Academy is, after all, a public school established by the New York City Department of Education, not a private school. Moreover, the department is trying to jam the academy into the same building as a pre-existing public elementary school. Clearly the problem here is the absence of choice for taxpayers and parents, not too much freedom.
Which brings us back to wrestling. Whenever you find your thinking getting fuzzy about whether school choice will produce less conflict than uniform government schooling, remember the difference between a regular professional wrestling ring and one in a steel cage. With the former, one can always avoid a fight. With the latter, there’s nowhere you can run.
An Army of Bureaucrats?
A few Members of Congress will reportedly draft legislation to create the United States Public Service Academy, which would be modeled after the four existing military academies.
Proponents of this idea note on their website that, “the federal government offers only one set of undergraduate institutions for high school seniors with the patriotic desire to serve their country: the military service academies.”
That may be true, but there are plenty of educational options for those who wish to pursue such a career. Why should taxpayers be responsible for an additional $205 million a year for a new public service academy when hundreds and hundreds of colleges and universities already offer public service programs?
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