Author Archive
Free Riders
I was watching the news and found rather disturbing the complaints of the journalists, who were shocked that U.S. law did not simply offer people in danger a free ride to safety at taxpayer expense. The U.S. Embassy in Lebanon was asking those who were being evacuated at taxpayer expense to sign a promissory note to reimburse the government for the evacuation. Some of the interviewed evacuees insisted that they be whisked away at taxpayer expense. (Those who complained about the lack of comfort on the ship were especially annoying. One complained that “My parents thought it was a cruise ship and it was definitely not a cruise ship.” Hey, sorry!) Under the theory that everything should be free, the government has announced that people who visit or live in dangerous places and are evacuated at taxpayer expense will not be charged a penny.
People who go to dangerous places (and Lebanon has been on that list for quite some time, both as a matter of common sense and as a matter of State Department designation) shouldn’t expect to be rescued from danger at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.
The Glories of a ‘Single Payer’ Health Care System
I recently attended a conference at Cambridge University, mainly involving Brits, none of whom had a good word to say about the National Health Service. What a change from times past, when so many British people thought it a matter of national pride to boast that “We have the finest health care system in the world.” (When I lived in the UK, I used to ask such people to what world they were referring, ’cause it sure wasn’t this one.)
Lo and behold, the NHS just released data on “hidden waits,” the time spent waiting for diagnostic tests. As the BBC noted in its coverage:
The figures, for 15 of the most common diagnostic tests including scans, internal examinations and hearing tests, mean that for many patients the wait for diagnosis is as long as the wait for treatment.
If you’re going to get sick with anything serious, be sure to do it in the United States. Even with all the problems facing American medicine and the irrationalities of our financing system, at least you’re likely to find out how sick you are and start treatment before it’s too late.
NHTSA: Unsafe at Any Speed?
According to CNN, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is making automobile travel in Toyotas less safe for children: “Toyota’s totally bizarre recall: Why would Toyota issue a recall designed to make vehicles less safe?”
Corruption Squared?
The Kenya head of Transparency International, a respected anti-corruption group, has been fired on the basis of allegations of …. corruption. That follows on the resignation (and departure for the United Kingdom, for understandable reasons) of John Githongo, who had prepared a scathing report on corruption in his capacity as Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in the Office of the President of Kenya. Githongo made a powerful presentation at the Cato Institute shortly after his resignation.
We’ve learned from experience that one way to reduce corruption is to reduce the power of politicians and bureaucrats to create “artificial shortages of freedom” through their powers to approve or withhold permits, permissions, certifications, etc., etc. Limiting the powers of politicians and bureaucrats is not the only measure that will reduce corruption, but it is certainly a central element of a solution to the problem of corruption, theft, and shakedowns.
Assimilation in America
In today’s Washington Post, Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tyler Cowen and his colleague Daniel Rothschild of the Mercatus Center provide data to assuage fears from American nativists that the U.S. is being overrun by unassimilated and unassimilable Hispanic immigrants.
And We Complain About America Being Too Litigious!
Check this out: the Catholic Church is being sued before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg…on the grounds that they have defrauded people by teaching that Jesus existed! The BBC had a story in January on this remarkable abuse of the legal system and the idea of “human rights.”
News from A Region of Hot Spots
My Azeri friends have brought to my attention two interesting news items from Azerbaijan and the large Azeri community in northern Iran. First is that the editor of a leading opposition paper, Bizim Yol (“Our Path”) (and formerly deputy editor of Azadlig [“Freedom”], which ran a story on my visit to Baku earlier this year), was savagely beaten on May 18 and that opposition leaders (such as Ali Kerimli), have pointed the finger at the authorities. (This is not the first time that journalists from the opposition side have been attacked.)
One email from an Azeri news group described the attack thus:
Bahaddin Haziyev, one of the best Azerbaijani journalists and one of the brillian minds of our country, was kidnapped, taken to Masazir lake, severely beaten and left to die almost to death last night by some people. He was deputy editor of Azadlig newspaper and since recently became a editor in chief of Bizim Yol newspaper. His newspaper an himself are very critical of Aliyev’s regime, the most recent series dedicated to caviar/fish mafia of Azerbaijan, portraying that Aliyev senior sacrificed lifes for monopoly in this sector.
Haziyev is in Intensive Therapy in the Emergency hospital. Doctor said that it is miracle that he survived. His leg is broken in five places, he has trauma of head, ribs are broken.
That is what happens to journalists in this country.
It takes real bravery to continue to speak up for freedom when under threat of such violence.
The other is a news story that was reported in the Washington Post about protests against Persian chauvinism among the very large Azeri minority in Iran. Photos are available here (on an Azeri nationalist website).
The cartoon that has caused the furor was published in Iran’s official newspaper (not, as in the Danish cartoons, in a private paper in a country with a free press):
The cartoon, which appeared in Friday’s edition of the official Iran newspaper, showed a boy repeating the Persian word for cockroach in different ways, while a cockroach in front of the boy asked “What?” in Azeri.
The Iranian mullahs may be creating difficult conditions for themselves by alienating, not only many young people (who yearn for what the Eastern Europeans used to call “a normal country”), but major ethnic minorities, as well.
The Strategy of Pure Destructionism
The flight of the Iraqi middle classes (New York Times; requires simple registration), which means among other things people with education and a more worldly viewpoint, is an especially dire sign for the future of Iraq. The goal of at least a large faction of the terrorists is pretty clear: to murder, bomb, and destroy their way to total chaos. This is just one example of their strategy:
Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.
Trash collectors, electricians, sewage repairmen, nurses, police officers, lawyers, and many other professions have been targeted, not for their ethnicity or their politics, but in order to wreck social order, destroy the infrastructure, and create such chaos that only the most vicious and brutal will survive to establish their rule. For some that means a revival of Ba’athism, for others a theocracy. And for yet others, an endless war throughout the region that will bleed America.
I have worked with Iraqis on my trips to the country to try to craft an acceptable constitutional and legal improvement over the previous situation and I will continue to do so. But I also do not underestimate the challenges that Iraqis face. As I pointed out in this essay in Reason magazine (the third essay of the three that are linked),
The war being fought in Iraq is unlike any other. Parallels with Vietnam are of limited use for the simple reason that the Communists were seeking to kick out the Saigon government and replace it, not to create a firestorm that would engulf the region. For Al Qaeda in Iraq, it won’t be over if the U.S. and allied forces withdraw, or the U.S.-backed government falls. In fact, many of those fighting the U.S. and the elected government don’t want the U.S. to withdraw. They want to draw us in further, hoping, as Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri recently put it, to “make the West bleed for years.” Nor is World War II a useful comparison: Once the Fascists and Nazis were beaten, they were beaten. They didn’t go underground and wage a war of destruction; their ideology was effectively defeated with their armies.
The goal of at least a large faction among the insurgents is to create maximum chaos and maximum bloodshed. They account for a tiny fraction of the Iraqi population, and no one really knows what percentage of them are foreigners, but they are ruthless and determined. They will also be very difficult to defeat. No accommodation is possible with them. The existence of an armed faction that is dedicated to destruction per se makes the job of defeating the insurgency all the more difficult.
George Will’s remarks on Thursday in Chicago at the Milton Friedman Prize dinner honoring 2006 winner Mart Laar were quite on target when he lambasted the administration for their decision to invade. The administration’s naivete in thinking that all you had to do was to remove a dictatorship to uncover a democracy has been shown to be absurd. Criminally so. (The issue of WMD is more complex, since it seems that they sincerely believed that Saddam had poison gas and biological weapons. Nonetheless, the president’s decision to award a medal to the man who presided over the “intelligence” fiasco was a deliberate thumb-in-the-eye to the American people.)
It’s long past time for the U.S. to craft a careful withdrawal strategy that sets goals for the Iraqis but makes it clear that U.S. forces will be gone and therefore that Iraqis will have to create peace among themselves. As the fiasco with Ibrahim al-Jaafari (who refused to step down for months, even though it was clear he could not be confirmed) made clear, factions will jockey for power and delay any defeat of the terrorists so long as they think that the U.S. will be there to protect them. That safety net for politicians has to be removed. They will have to fashion their own safety net by fashioning peace themselves among the factions.
Judicial Independence as Key Ingredient of Freedom
I’m in Beirut, where I’ve been meeting with Arabic newspaper and book publishers for Cato’s Arabic publishing venture and where I led a seminar today at the American University of Beirut.
One hot topic of discussion here has been the ongoing protests in Egypt over the independence of the judiciary. Democracy is often identified only with elections, but a lasting democracy has to involve a lot more than the ballot box. A liberal democracy isn’t just about free elections, but about the constitutional context — securing the rights of the people to freedom under law, rather than subjugation to arbitrary power — within which free elections serve an important but limited role.
As the Egyptian demonstrators have realized, free elections are not possible without an independent judiciary to ensure that the law is followed. That very same independent judiciary, in turn, is a central feature of the predictability of law that is necessary for a social order to flourish. Mancur Olson pointed out in 1993 in the American Political Science Review that ”the same court system, independent judiciary, and respect for law and individual rights that are needed for a lasting democracy are also required for security of property and contract rights.”
Let’s hope that as the Egyptians struggle for an independent judiciary that can monitor and check the executive power, we in the U.S. manage to keep our judiciary from submitting to domination by an executive branch that is hell-bent on sacrificing the separation of powers in pursuit of its claims of unlimited power. As James Madison noted in Federalist 78, the independence of the judiciary should be regarded as “the citadel of the public justice and the public security.”
Absorbing Immigrants?
One of America’s best Myth-Busters, Prof. Don Boudreaux of George Mason University economics department, takes on the myth that “America just can’t absorb any more immigrants.”
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