Author Archive
A Marshalltown Plan for Immigration
Below, Tom Palmer mentions Cato adjunct scholar Don Boudreaux’s wonderful essay on the ability of today’s United States to absorb immigrants as compared to our storied Ellis Island immigration heyday. I’d like to add a point that many Lou Dobbs fans seem not to fully grasp. Not only can we accommodate more people, we need more people.
I grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. I’ll tell you, they’re not running out of space in Marshalltown. From the historic courthouse at the center of town, a ten to fifteen minute drive in any direction will put you in a cornfield. Over the past decade or so, Marshalltown has seen an influx of Mexicans — many from a single village, Villachuato — who came to work at the Swift meatpacking plant, or in the fields in the summer. This has caused a bit of friction in a middle-class town with a largely German and Scandinavian heritage — but just a bit. In fact, many small Midwestern towns like Marshalltown have been fighting for decades to hold on to a dwindling population. This is a real problem. Marshalltown businesses, for example, receive less than one application for each new job opening.
In 2001, with typical Iowan civic spirit, then-mayor Floyd Harthun ventured down to Villachuato to see if he could learn something about Marshalltown’s newest workers and taxpayers. Here’s part of an account of that trip, from a 2002 article in Governing Magazine (for state and local governments), which illustrates the symbiotic relationship between Mexican immigrants and towns like Marshalltown:
New at Cato Unbound: Boaz on Leadership for Limited Government
In today’s installment of Cato Unbound, Cato’s executive vice president David Boaz argues that the Republicans have failed Reagan’s vision, offering their own brand of meddlesome statism as an alternative to the Democrats’. Boaz maintains that there is in the U.S. a constituency for limited government, but it is in need of a principled leader. So those who hold fast to limited government ideals
must translate that vision into policy proposals, organizations, and political movements. As John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, advocates of liberty and limited government must make ready the ideas, the platform, the networks that could serve a political leader who wanted to take on the task of clearing away the late 20th century’s accumulated burden of bureaucratic systems, unfunded liabilities, overextended military commitments, and usurpations of the responsibilities of free citizens.
Writing in Friday’s edition, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue, less hopefully, that although a renewed push for smaller government isn’t in the cards, Republicans can realistically hope to win reforms that promote “freedom, self-reliance, and individual initiative”—values at the core of the limited-government movement. In the current climate, Douthat and Salam write, “simply calling for the rollback of government appeals only to those already in the winner’s circle of American life. . .” So, they argue, Republicans “need to accept that government will remain large in the short run . . . while pursuing long-range strategies that will produce a more opportunity-friendly, less statist America.”
Later this week, David Frum will kick off the informal blog conversation among this month’s contributors with a reply to their comment essays. Keep your feed readers tuned!
Stumbling on Paternalism?
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s new book, Stumbling on Happiness, appears to be all the rage. Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tyler Cowen thought it was the best book he had read this year, until he forgot, and nominated David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations instead. In any case, Gilbert is one of the world’s experts about “affective forecasting,” i.e., our ability to predict how we will feel in the future. Generally, we overshoot the mark. Here’s a bit from Scott Stossel’s review in the NYT:
Events that we anticipate will give us joy make us less happy than we think; things that fill us with dread will make us less unhappy, for less long, than we anticipate. As evidence, Gilbert cites studies showing that a large majority of people who endure major trauma (wars, car accidents, rapes) in their lives will return successfully to their pre-trauma emotional state — and that many of them will report that they ended up happier than they were before the trauma. It’s as though we’re equipped with a hedonic thermostat that is constantly resetting us back to our emotional baseline.
Why might this be of political interest? Recall that part of J.S. Mill’s famous libertarian argument against paternalistic interference in On Liberty is based in the following claim:
New at Cato Unbound: Dark Days for Small Government
Today in Cato Unbound, Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, agrees with David Frum’s gloomy assessment of the prospects for small government and argues that conservatives and libertarians often compound the problem by failing to understand the magnitude and political intractability of the government’s non-discretionary entitlement programs. Slashing government is not “as easy as waving a magic wand.” Bartlett warns of the danger of resigning in frustration and calls for “a serious debate among libertarians and small government-types on a realistic political strategy for achieving their goals.”
Stay tuned! Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam will comment Friday, and Cato’s David Boaz will round out the replies to Frum with an essay on Monday.
New at Cato Unbound: Can Republicans Stop Thinking Big?
Former Bush speechwriter and bestselling author David Frum kicks off this month’s edition of Cato Unbound, “The GOP and Limited Government: Do They Have a Future Together?,” with a provocative essay considering whether the window of political opportunity has forever closed for the small-government heirs of Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich. He is not optimistic:
[T]he day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.
Over the course of this week Cato Unbound will unveil response essays by Bruce Bartlett, author of Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy; fresh-faced political commentators Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of a forthcoming book on “Sam’s Club Republicans”; and Cato’s own esteemed executive vice-president, David Boaz. Come for the finely crafted essays this week, but stay for the informal blog chat next week and watch our panelists lock horns (or sagely agree with one another) in real time, blog-style.
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