Author Archive
Flex Your Rights
Friends of the Cato Institute who closely follow the news about search and seizure and other civil liberties issues will probably know that there are simple, practical steps one can take to exercise our constitutionally guaranteed liberties, even when confronted by the police.
For everyone else, there’s Flex Your Rights. Founded by former Cato intern Steven Silverman, Flex Your Rights aims to teach ordinary citizens how to make good use of their civil liberties:
The vast majority of people are mystified by the basic rules of search and seizure and due process of law. Consequentially, they’re likely to be tricked or intimidated by police into waiving their constitutional rights, resulting in a greater likelihood of regrettable outcomes.
The sum of these outcomes flow into all major criminal justice problems — including racial and class disparities in search, arrest, sentencing and incarceration rates.
In order to ensure that constitutional rights and equal justice are upheld by law enforcement, we must build a constitutionally literate citizenry.
“Regrettable outcomes” aren’t limited to time behind bars for breaking the drug laws. Consider also damage to property during searches, loss of dignity and privacy, wasted law enforcement time, and police violence during what’s sure to be a nerve-wracking encounter. All of this can happen even when you’re not violating any laws at all, and that’s reason enough to refuse a search.
The police, and the laws themselves, should work for us, and if we don’t require their help, then that should usually be for us to decide. Flex Your Rights is here to help you do so. They’ve just launched a revamped website, which looks great, and they also have a new film in production titled 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. I look forward to seeing it!
New at Cato Unbound: Will Wilkinson Discusses Inequality and Justice
American income inequality is rising, we are told. By some measures, this is true — but what should we do about it? In this month’s Cato Unbound, Will Wilkinson discusses the politics of inequality. He asks a question that in my (perhaps biased) opinion deserves more attention: If income inequality is bad, and if it’s rising, why is income redistribution the answer? Shouldn’t we correct the underlying problem, rather than just one of its symptoms?
This underlying problem could be anything from high imprisonment rates, to inadequate schools, to corrupt CEOs — or a combination of these and other factors. It may be harder to fix these things than it would be to tax the rich more heavily. But correcting income inequality with redistribution may only mask an underlying injustice, or several of them, each with other bad effects on our society.
All through this week, we will have response essays by thoughtful commentators — sociologist Lane Kenworthy, economist John V. C. Nye, and philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. Be sure to stop by and see what they have to say about inequality in America, why it matters, and what we should do about it.
Peace? The Promise of Peace? Eh, Close Enough
Worse choices have been made than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize.
There was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, an award that rates as one of history’s more grotesque international jokes. Wilson promised to keep us out of war and promptly got us into it, meanwhile laying the ideological and geopolitical foundations for 90 years of war-nationalism, war-liberalism, and war-socialism. To say nothing of saddling us with the terrible idea of world government. Among those who weren’t Nazis or communists, Wilson may have done more than any other individual to promote human suffering in the last hundred years.
So yes, there have been worse choices. (Next to Wilson, I’d have to give Al Gore and Yasser Arafat both honorable mentions. We could go on, of course.) But still, Barack Obama? Seriously? I doubt the committee has any idea how badly their choice will be mocked in the United States.
Over here, the prize will be a disappointment to the anti-war left, the anti-war right, and, of course, the pro-war right. The only contingent I can see taking pride in it over here is the establishment left, which hasn’t had much time lately for substantive work on peace, but which is always happy to make speeches and receive awards. Sometimes, the American image abroad is just that important.
Rather than piling on in what is sure to be a bipartisan laugh-fest, let’s think about what Barack Obama actually could have done for world peace. And weep.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Free Speech, Hate Speech, and Canada’s Section 13
NewMajority.com has a great series of videos showing the testimony of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant against Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That section empowers the Canadian Human Rights Commission to punish telecommunications that are “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” owing to their protected minority status. It is, in short, a hate speech law.
Penalties are harsh, and can include large fines as well as a lifetime publication ban. For a supposedly liberal country like Canada, Section 13 is an extraordinarily illiberal law.
Section 13 has also lined the pockets of one Richard Warman, a former employee of the Commission who has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of prosecutions in the last decade. Steyn and Levant show in their testimony how Section 13 has prompted computer hacking, the planting of false hate speech, and other underhanded techniques from Warman and the rest of its enforcers. Levant suggests that Warman, a privileged white male lawyer, has been the single greatest beneficiary of the law.
Business regulation boards commonly get taken over by the friends of big business. This is a huge problem in the study of law and economics, one with its very own name — regulatory capture.
Preventive Detention: What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?
By all accounts, the White House is going to unveil its proposal for indefinite detention within the next four to eight weeks, and it has begun dispatching proponents of that scheme to lay the rhetorical groundwork. In The Washington Post today, one of the proposal’s architects — Law Professor Robert Chesney, a member of Obama’s Detention Policy Task Force — showcased the trite and manipulative tactics that will be used by advocates of indefinite detention to win support for their radical program [anyone doubting that detention without trials is radical should recall that Obama's own White House counsel Greg Craig told Jane Mayer back in February that it's "hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law"; New York Times reporter William Glaberson wrote that "Obama's detention policy "would be a departure from the way this country sees itself"; Sen. Russ Feingold warned that it "violates basic American values," "is likely unconstitutional," and "is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world"; The New York Times' Bob Herbert said that "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention"; and the Obama policy's most vigorous Congressional proponents are Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham].
According to Chesney, though, the real extremists are those “on the left” who oppose preventive detention; those who believe that radical liberties such as criminal charges, trials and due process are necessary before the state can put someone in a cage for life; those who agree with Thomas Jefferson that trial by jury is “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” Chesney insists that such people (these “leftists”) are (as always) the mirror images of the extremists on the Right, who “carelessly depict civil-liberties advocates as weak-kneed fools who are putting American lives at risk.” These two equally partisan, radical, extremist sides (i.e., those who believe in due process and trials and those who oppose them) are — sadly — “shrink[ing] the political space within which reasonable, sustainable policies [i.e., Chesney's preventive detention scheme] might be crafted with bipartisan support.”
…This is how political debates are typically carried out in Washington by the Serious Centrists and Responsible Adults. Chesney writes an entire Op-Ed defending the soon-to-be-unveiled preventive detention policy without describing a single aspect of it. To Serious people, the substance of the policy is irrelevant. What matters is that anyone who opposes it is a radical, partisan, shrill extremist. Conversely, as long as the Obama administration stays somewhere in the middle of the two sides — between Tom Coburn and Russ Feingold — then it proves they are being sensible, moderate and responsible, regardless of how extreme and dangerous their proposal actually is, and regardless of how close to Coburn and as far from Feingold as they end up.
No system of justice is perfect. But it’s no improvement to decide that in certain cases we can just do better without one.
All that such a policy does is to move the act of judging back one level — and to locate it at the point where someone, somewhere decides that this particular case doesn’t get judged in the usual way. And so the accused gets “detention” rather than “trial, followed possibly by prison.” But we are still putting a person, and perhaps a dangerous person, in a cage, are we not? The acts of judging and of punishing are still there, and we have hidden them only from ourselves.
It is no improvement to shift the fundamental problem of justice to a different location — out of open courtrooms, out of review, out of established legal tradition — and into a shadowy realm where potentially anything goes. We’re deluding ourselves if we think that it is a step forward or a refinement in the criminal law to have its work done somewhere else, by someone else. The work goes on, and with it all of the associated dangers. Western legal philosophy has spent centuries forcing these dangers out into the open, so that we may confront them directly.
But oddly, Professor Chesney is actually right in one respect:
The problem is twofold. First, the national dialogue has been dominated by a pair of dueling narratives that together reduce the space available for nuanced, practical solutions that may require compromise from both camps. On the one hand, critics of the government’s policies promiscuously invoke the post-Sept. 11 version of the Imperial Presidency narrative, reflexively depicting security-oriented policies in terms of executive branch power aggrandizement (with de rigueur references to former vice president Dick Cheney; his chief of staff, David Addington; or Justice Department attorney John Yoo, if not all three). On the other hand, supporters of the government’s policies just as carelessly depict civil-liberties advocates as weak-kneed fools who are putting American lives at risk.
Second, individual issues in the debate over detention policy are often framed in stark and incompatible terms. Take, for example, the Guantanamo detainees, who are portrayed in some quarters as innocent bystanders to the last man and in other quarters as the “worst of the worst.” While both extremes are misleading, their influence is pervasive.
True enough. A reasonable middle position? Give the detainees trials in which they can individually prove their guilt or innocence. Surely they aren’t all guilty, and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone claim that they are all innocent, either. The truth really is somewhere in between, and it just so happens that we already have a mechanism for sorting out muddled cases like these.
“Three Amigos” Meet, Drugs on the Agenda
The presidents of Mexico and the United States and the prime minister of Canada are meeting today in Guadalajara. One of the many things they’ll discuss will be cross-border drug trafficking and the violence that accompanies it. Although swine flu is making the headlines, most Americans probably don’t know that drug violence has killed many times more people than the attention-grabbing epidemic.
Who knew this presumably important fact? The well-informed readers of Cato Unbound, that’s who. (Swine flu has killed 1,154 worldwide; since 2006, drug violence has killed more than ten thousand in Mexico alone.)
This month’s lead essayist, former Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castañeda, complains of “A U.S. War with Mexican Consequences.” He notes that we in the United States have a greater taste than Mexicans for both illegal drugs and prohibition. And we have a disturbing tendency to export the consequences of those tastes to Mexico. Without the United States, there would scarcely be a Mexican drug problem. Many policies offered as solutions aren’t working. In particular, militarization is a dangerous step that has worked out badly in other Latin American countries; a U.S. military presence would be politically unpopular and would not be tolerated in Mexico. Mexico pursuing drug decriminalization is just as unpopular in the United States; American governments have worked hard to keep decriminalization off the Mexican political agenda.
Journalist and Latin American affairs expert Stephanie Hanson of the Council on Foreign Relations responds that both countries should consider decriminalization of marijuana and possibly of harder drugs as well. It may be time, she suggests, to admit that prohibition isn’t working, at least as it’s been practiced so far. She points to experiments conducted in the Netherlands, Portugal, and — for those not as well-informed — the experiment in the fictional Baltimore of The Wire, where decriminalization offered a measure of calm, albeit only for one episode.
Another expert in the area, James Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, suggests otherwise. Drug decriminalization and/or legalization will also ruin lives and kill people, just as prohibition has done, except this time it will be done with the support of our governments. Rather than give in to the drug cartels, he recommends fighting them every step of the way. In any event, decriminalization is never going to succeed politically in the United States, so we’re better off with a vigorous, effective prohibition than a halfhearted one.
Tomorrow we’ll hear from Cato’s own Ted Galen Carpenter, an expert with yet another view of the situation. A discussion will follow over the next few weeks and, given the diversity of views, it will no doubt be an interesting one.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security
Robert Wright at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound features Robert Wright, who offers us an excerpt from his new book, The Evolution of God. He looks at the possibility of religious tolerance from a game theoretic and evolutionary psychology perspective: Is there a fundamental “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West? Or just a communication failure? Wright argues that we can work toward understanding by realizing the limits and biases of human moral reasoning:
You might not guess it to read the headlines, but by and large the relationship between “the West” and “the Muslim World” is non-zero-sum. To be sure, the relationship between some Muslims and the West is zero-sum. Terrorist leaders have aims that are at odds with the welfare of Westerners. The West’s goal is to hurt their cause, to deprive them of new recruits and of political support. But if we take a broader view—look not at terrorists and their supporters but at Muslims in general, look not at radical Islam but at Islam—the “Muslim world” and the “West” are playing a non-zero-sum game; their fortunes are positively correlated. And the reason is that what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims. If Muslims get less happy with their place in the world, more resentful of their treatment by the West, support for radical Islam will grow, so things will get worse for the West. If, on the other hand, more and more Muslims feel respected by the West and feel they benefit from involvement with it, that will cut support for radical Islam, and Westerners will be more secure from terrorism.
This isn’t an especially arcane piece of logic. The basic idea is that terrorist leaders are the enemy and they thrive on the discontent of Muslims—and if what makes your enemy happy is the discontent of Muslims broadly, then you should favor their contentment. Obviously. Indeed this view has become conventional wisdom: if the West can win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims, it will have “drained the swamp” in which terrorists thrive. In that sense, there is widespread recognition in the West of the non-zero-sum dynamic.
But this recognition hasn’t always led to sympathetic overtures from Westerners toward Muslims. The influential evangelist Franklin Graham declared that Muslims don’t worship the same god as Christians and Jews and that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion.” That’s no way to treat people you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with! And Graham is not alone. Lots of evangelical Christians and other Westerners view Muslims with suspicion, and view relations between the West and the Muslim world as a “clash of civilizations.” And many Muslims view the West in similarly win-lose terms.
So what’s going on here? Where’s the part of human nature that was on display in ancient times—the part that senses whether you’re in the same boat as another group of people and, if you are, fosters sympathy for or at least tolerance of them?
It’s in there somewhere, but it’s misfiring. And one big reason is that our mental equipment for dealing with game-theoretical dynamics was designed for a hunter-gatherer environment, not for the modern world. That’s why dealing with current events wisely requires strenuous mental effort—effort that ultimately, as it happens, could bring moral progress.
New at Cato Unbound: Ten Years of Code
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig’s seminal work on Internet law, turns ten this year. To mark the occasion, Cato Unbound has invited a distinguished panel of Internet law experts to discuss the book’s enduring significance: What did it get right? What did it get wrong? And where do we go from here?
Joining us will be Adam Thierer, Jonathan Zittrain, and Lawrence Lessig himself. The lead essay, up this morning, is by Declan McCullagh. Readers of Code will recall that McCullagh was called out by name in the book’s final chapter, and his “do-nothing” cyberlibertarian views were criticized at length. Ten years later, is it time to reconsider? Join us and find out.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Cato Unbound Update
This month’s issue of Cato Unbound has drawn an extraordinarily hostile response from a couple of mainstream online publications. Writing at Salon, Michael Lind inferred, mistakenly, that our interest in Seasteading and other radical libertarian projects was due to our disappointment that Republicans lost in the 2008 election. Because this issue was my idea, I feel I can speak effectively to the charge.
As I see things, it was basically impossible to cast either John McCain or Barack Obama as a libertarian. Neither of them shared the policy goals of the Cato Institute to any appreciable degree. Speaking as a private individual, I didn’t vote for either of them, and I don’t regret my choice. I found both Democrats and Republicans profoundly unappealing this election cycle.
This issue of Cato Unbound was motivated solely by my desire to see one particularly radical branch of libertarianism publicly confront its critics. I wanted to see how well it could hold up. Whether it stood or fell, the issue would have served its purpose. Electoral politics had nothing to do with it.
New at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound continues our tradition of stirring up controversy. The lead essay is by Patri Friedman, who challenges the advocates of liberty as follows:
I deeply yearn to live in an actual free society, not just to imagine a theoretical future utopia or achieve small incremental gains in freedom. For many years, I enthusiastically advocated for liberty under the vague assumption that advocacy would help our cause. However, I recently began trying to create free societies as my full-time job, and this has given me a dramatic perspective shift from my days of armchair philosophizing. My new perspective is that the advocacy approach which many libertarian individuals, groups, and think tanks follow (including me sometimes, sadly) is an utter waste of time.
Argument has refined our principles, and academic research has enlarged our understanding, but they have gotten us no closer to an actual libertarian state. Our debating springs not from calculated strategy, but from an intuitive “folk activism”: an instinct to seek political change through personal interaction, born in our hunter-gatherer days when all politics was personal. In the modern world, however, bad policies are the result of human action, not human design. To change them we must understand how they emerge from human interaction, and then alter the web of incentives that drives behavior. Attempts to directly influence people or ideas without changing incentives, such as the U.S. Libertarian Party, the Ron Paul campaign, and academic research, are thus useless for achieving real-world liberty.
Cato isn’t called out by name, but it easily could have been. Like I said, Cato Unbound tries to be controversial.
What’s needed, Friedman claims, is not more study or advocacy, but a change in the deeper institutional structures that give rise to government policies. Competition among states (and non-state agents!), new technologies, and new intentional communities may just induce old-fashioned governments to behave a whole lot better. By contrast, just recommending somewhat better policies won’t do very much, not if all we do is write about them. (Friedman seems particularly skeptical about blogs. Ahem.)
Is this just a young person’s impatience? Or has Friedman found a serious weakness in libertarian activism? One reply I might make is that Cato scholars have researched quite a few topics that Friedman would probably find worthwhile. It’s important to document these things, and much of this work directly furthers the kind of structural reform that Friedman favors.
Consider the many Cato scholars who have heralded the rise of tax competition — in which states feel increasing pressure to deliver a low-cost product when their taxpayers can move elsewhere. Or consider Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book whose conclusions inform Friedman’s own project. This book began with a series of discussions among public policy scholars (on a blog no less!). Cato actively promoted Caplan’s work, and we would hope that Friedman would find this an effort well-spent. An upcoming event with author James Tooley shows how the world’s poor are founding their own schools to educate themselves, admirably free from any state interference — a new, private social practice bests an incompetent government! These things matter, I’d say, and they matter even if we accept Friedman’s premises. (We’re also giving a platform to Friedman, both here and at an event on April 7.)
In any case, this a big and very important discussion for the libertarian movement, of which the Cato Institute is only a part. Cato Unbound will have a remarkable series of panelists commenting throughout this week and next, including Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and noted philanthropist; and Brian Doherty, who has researched and written about more forms of libertarian activism than most of us can even recall. Whatever side of the debate you end up taking, be sure to stop by to catch this month’s edition of Cato Unbound.
Fight Moral Panics — With Beer!
In the UK and here at home, brewers have increasingly been producing specialty beers with the alcohol content of wine. Naturally, it’s time for a moral panic:
The new breed of bitters, with their intense flavours and alcohol contents of up to 12 per cent, are the work of young brewing entrepreneurs trying capture the attention — and cash — of lager-guzzling twentysomethings.
Beer writers and aficionados have welcomed the speciality bottles, which can contain 10 times as much hops as a traditional pint, as a necessary revitalisation of a market dominated by corporate giants turning out similar 4 per cent brown bitters.
But alcohol campaigners have complained that drinkers may be unaware of the strength of the new products, a single 330ml bottle of which is enough to make an adult exceed their daily recommended alcohol intake.
In January the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, ruled the brashest exponent of the movement, BrewDog brewery in Aberdeen, had broken its code on responsible marketing for its Speed Ball beer, named after the cocktail of cocaine and heroin which killed the actor John Belushi, star of The Blues Brothers.
Despite the group rejecting complaints against three of BrewDog’s other beers, Punk IPA, Rip Tide and Hop Rocker, its managing director, James Watt, accused Portman of being “outdated” and “out of touch”. He did, however, concede that his company had been provocative. “We thought we would give them something worth banning us for,” he said.
Good for them.
Note the comically low, and comically named, “recommended daily alcohol intake,” which would apparently forbid splitting a standard bottle of wine with another drinker. (Is there any better way to drink wine?) Incidentally, today’s 750 mL bottle derives from the “fifth,” or fifth of a gallon, which in the good old barrel-chested days of yore may well have been a single-serving portion.
In Defense of Gouging
There are lots of things to hate about our current medical system, and all of us have our own favorite things to hate. This is mine: the fact that the system massively overcharges you if you’re uninsured, and they do it just because they can. If you’re uninsured, you’ve got no leverage, no alternatives, no nothing. So you get screwed. It’s like the shopkeepers who charge twenty bucks for a pair of flashlight batteries after hurricanes. Maybe it’s the free market at work, but if so, that’s all the worse for the free market. In the healthcare biz, it just doesn’t work.
I see it’s time to roll up the sleeves.
First, let’s look at price gouging after a hurricane. I admit it — in a free market, that’s precisely what happens. People get charged much higher prices. And I actually don’t mind calling it gouging.
But do you know what happens when a disaster strikes in an unfree market? Forced appropriation by the politically well-connected. Instead of higher prices for everyone, you get free stuff for a privileged few — and nothing, or very little, for everyone else.
Let’s use the proper term here as well: theft. In a free market, you see gouging. In an unfree one, you see theft.
Philip Pullman on the Loss of Civil Liberties in Britain
Philip Pullman had an opinion piece in the Times of London today to mark the Convention on Modern Liberty, a one-day gathering of activists interested in civil liberties. Weirdly, the piece isn’t available at the Times anymore, and it has not been for several hours. Even the Google cache has been unreliable, though it’s up as of this writing. The vast community at BoingBoing has been watching closely.
Thankfully, the Libertarian Alliance seems to have the full text:
The new laws whisper:
You don’t know who you are
You’re mistaken about yourself
We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless
We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you
And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised
The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:
Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity
Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them
So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are
And we do not want to hear you arguing about it
So hold your tongue and forget about protesting
What we want from you is acquiescence
The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.
If the Times doesn’t want these words, I’d like to borrow them.
A Simple Way to Enrich Everyone, Instantly
Hey Slate! I can commit the broken window fallacy too. Can I write a business column? Pretty please?
The economy of the Washington, D.C., area has boomed in recent decades not so much because the federal government has expanded its payrolls massively but because private government contractors have been thriving. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes, in January, “the large areas with the lowest jobless rates in December were Oklahoma City, Okla., and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va.” — a capital city, and the capital city.
I have a modest proposal, then.
Washington, DC is only one city, but what we really want is to enrich the whole country. I therefore propose that we increase all federal taxes by a factor of sixty, so that federal spending, which now only enriches the 5 million in the DC area, will be enough to enrich all 300 million Americans.
We can spend it on a proportionate number of “private” government contractors if it helps. That’s fine with me — you know how we free-marketers love anything calling itself “private.” All that matters is that we keep borrowing, taxing, and inflating ourselves into the wealth that Washington so obviously has. That, you see, is the power of private enterprise.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Cato Unbound: An Appreciation of Partisanship
This month’s Cato Unbound is up, featuring a lead essay by Harvard Professor Nancy Rosenblum. She discusses themes developed more fully in her book On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship. Rosenblum makes the case that political parties have gotten an undeserved bad reputation, and that they do useful, unappreciated coordinating work in democratic politics.
In the first response essay, Brink Lindsey replies in essence that political parties are much better than they used to be, but there’s still plenty to complain about. Response essays by Henry Farrell of George Washington University and James Fishkin of Stanford University will appear on Friday and Monday, respectively, followed by a blog chat among the authors.
My own biggest questions on the topic are as follows.
First, is it even meaningful to say that we are “for” or “against” partisanship? Or, when we say this, are we really just saying that we’re for or against certain aspects of partisanship? Political parties seem to appear wherever we find the concepts of representative democracy and loyal opposition. Complaining about political parties is a bit like being against the weather.
We may hate many of the things that political parties do, but their main alternatives seem to be dictatorships and death squads. Even the most committed anti-partisans wouldn’t go that route. And even those who cheer for partisan politics may seem to be making a virtue of necessity.
Second, what about the legal regime that sustains the two-party system? The rules that support partisan politics were written by partisans, after all. Certainly we can’t just take them as a given. Ballot access regulations, campaign finance rules, and the incumbent advantage help to give us the specific type of partisan politics we have. Who else gets to write their own ticket like that, and should we let them?
Filed under: Cato Publications; Education and Child Policy; Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
The Freedom to Do Business
Cato author Tim Sandefur has a video on YouTube about a truly awful business regulation in Oregon, one that prevents anyone from starting a moving company without in effect the permission of the existing moving companies. As you can probably imagine, they aren’t eager to give it.
Sandefur and his employer, the Pacific Legal Foundation, are fighting the cartel:
Good for them.
The Future of Free Ice Cream and How to Stop It
I’m reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and I’m having a hard time granting plausibility to the book’s thesis. Zittrain writes as follows:
As ubiquitous as Internet technologies are today, the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. This counterrevolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity — and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability. (p. 8 )
As examples, he contrasts the Apple II, a classic of early personal computing, to the iPhone of today. The first is wide-open to outside development, insecure, not always dependable, and susceptible to hacking by both friendly and unfriendly parties. The second is sterile, secure, and, we are told, entirely under the thumb of a now much more sinister corporation. Unless we do something, that corporation’s control over information technology will, he believes, quickly morph into state control as well. Zittrain seeks a world that is open to the personal computer, which he views as as a device that enables a particular computing ethos — one of open, freewheeling exchange and innovation. The iPhone represents that world’s antithesis, and the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it.
Although I’m certainly concerned about civil liberties and privacy issues on the Internet, I have a lot of questions about Zittrain’s thesis.
This Month at Cato Unbound: What Happened?
Writing the history of a financial crisis can’t be easy, and it’s even harder when that crisis is still unfolding. That’s why this month we’ve invited a team of economic experts for a very special issue of Cato Unbound. Each brings a different perspective on our financial troubles, and, partly because the matter is so far from settled, we’ve decided to give them all equal billing: Lawrence H. White, William K. Black, Casey Mulligan, and J. Bradford DeLong will each write a full-length essay in a first of its kind roundtable format. The question at hand: What happened?
Prof. White’s essay is available here, and I found the following particularly interesting:
One can’t explain an unusual cluster of errors by citing greed, which is always around, just as one can’t explain a cluster of airplane crashes by citing gravity. Anyway, the greedy aim at profits, not losses.
I’m just old enough to remember how everyone called the 1980s a decade of greed. Then there were the 1990s, also a decade of greed. The 2000s? Greed yet again. (I wish I could invest in this “greed” thing. It never seems to go out of style.)
I also liked the following, which makes one of its most substantive points in the final parenthesis:
As calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Fed from early 2001 until late 2006 pushed the actual federal funds rate well below the estimated rate that would have been consistent with targeting a 2 percent inflation rate for the PCE [Personal Consumption Expenditure] deflator. The gap was especially large—200 basis point or more—from mid-2003 to mid-2005. [4]
The excess credit thus created went heavily into real estate. From mid-2003 to mid-2007, while the dollar volume of final sales of goods and services was growing at a compounded rate of 5.9 percent per annum, real-estate loans at commercial banks were (as already noted) growing at 12.26 percent. [5] Credit-fueled demand both pushed up the sale prices of existing houses and encouraged the construction of new housing on undeveloped land. Because real estate is an especially long-lived asset, its market value is especially boosted by low interest rates. The housing sector thus exhibited a disproportionate share of the price inflation predicted by the Taylor Rule. (House prices are not, however, included in standard measures of price inflation.)
I understand that it isn’t easy to incorporate housing prices into measures of inflation, and that there is no generally accepted method of doing it. It seems more important than ever, though, to include these prices in some way, if only to let the public know the sort of trouble housing inflation has very likely been causing.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics
Obama’s Touch Cured Me of Scrofula
Arjun Appadurai (of “Magic Ballot” fame) has replied to my recent post. I think it’s at least worth clearing up a few misconceptions:
I assume Mr. Kuznicki is sympathetic to the mission of the Cato Institute, whose name can be traced back to Cato the Younger, implacable foe of Julius Caesar. Alas, he sounds a lot more like Cato the Elder, also known as Cato the Censor, famed for his rigid moralizing, his ascetical approach to public spending, and his brutal approach to war against the enemies of Rome.
I don’t care for moralizing, and still less for war, but I’m guilty as charged when it comes to asceticism in public spending.
I believe that the government should live within its means, and that whenever possible, workers and investors should keep what they earn. Call me a penny-pincher, but I think that terming a $700 billion bank bailout “magic,” as Mr. Appadurai did, is the single weakest justification I’ve ever heard for any government project, ever. And I’ve heard some doozies before.
Calling acts of government “magic” gives our political leaders way more credit than they deserve. Our leaders may be intelligent, or charismatic, or honest, or judicious. But even the best of them are not magic. To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought this a controversial idea.
Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain
I’m sorry, but this just makes me ill. In a post he actually titled “The Magic Ballot,” Arjun Appadurai writes:
The word is MAGIC. On the night of November 4, it felt as if something magical had happened, and perhaps there were others, like me, who used that word. But it is not the biggest word in current public use and I wish it were more fully available to us now.
We’ve chosen someone to work for us. We’ve hired him. For a job. We did it through the (yes, rather nifty) process of democracy. And… That. Is. All. Barack Obama is an employee. He’s not a magician. We can fire him later if we like, and he’s not going to retaliate by turning us all into toads or shooting lighting bolts out of his eyes.
I know that many believe that priests can perform miracles, at least of certain kinds, but Obama isn’t a priest. Tuesday night did not and could not make him one. It’s superstitious, impious, or both, to think that something as common as a democratic election could endow anyone with magical powers.
I regret that we are forced to catch the special aura of this election without a deep and serious space for the idea of magic, magic as it used to be. It would help us fill this rhetorical void. It would let us name the un-nameable and it would let us enjoy our means even without certainty about our ends. It would let us enjoy this week without dragging it immediately into boring predictions about what Nancy Pelosi will do, about how many huge headaches Obama will face, about how heavy the coming storm will be, and how fragile our collective sources. We have hardly crowned Obama and we have promptly begun to mourn for him, as if he is has already been vanquished by his foes.
Crowned??? Sir, this is a Lockean republic, not a New-Age theocracy.
But wait, it gets worse:
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