What is due process?

Virtually everyone would agree that “due process” refers to a set of judicial procedures that create at least a strong tendency toward fair results.

But why do we have these procedures and not some others? Why do we have trial by jury, and not trial by fire? Why not just flip a coin? In this month’s Cato Unbound, our lead essayist, Timothy Sandefur, says that we have the procedures we do for one very simple reason: We recognize them as fair.

In other words, “due process” ultimately points back at a larger — and much thornier — legal and philosophical issue, that of fair treatment itself. If it didn’t, “due process” would just guarantee some empty (or possibly harmful) rituals.

So far, so good. Sandefur doesn’t stop there, however. He adds that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantees of due process mean “not only that government must take certain procedural steps (hearings, trials, and so forth) when it imposes a deprivation, but also that some acts are off limits for government, “regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them.”

In other words, due process is a check both on the procedure of the judiciary and on the substance of legislation. Some kinds of laws, Sandefur argues, cannot be implemented by any fair process — there’s no good reason for them, and there’s no lipstick enough for pigs like these. In such cases, the guarantee of due process is either a mockery of itself — or it’s enough to strike down the law. Sandefur picks the latter.

Is he right? Professor Lawrence Rosenthal of Chapman University disagrees, writing:

Deciding whether a law is supported by “good reason” is the essence of policymaking. Our Constitution guarantees a republican form of government, and in a republic, policy is made by those who are politically accountable for their decisions. Sandefur’s conception of due process of law, however, creates a judicial platonic guardianship that must approve every policy decision.

One side risks judicial overreach. The other side risks the tyranny of the majority. Which one is right? Stay tuned for the rest of this month’s Cato Unbound, which will also feature commentary by legal scholars Ryan Williams of the University of Pennsylvania and Gary Lawson of Boston University. Legal scholars will also want to review Sandefur’s paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (pdf), which develops the argument in fuller detail.

This Month’s Cato Unbound: What Is Due Process? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s been a busy week over at Libertarianism.org. We began with a new Excursions essay from George H. Smith. Provocatively titled “Fingering the King on the Road to Independence,” Smith’s piece examines how the pre-Revolution Coercive Acts led Americans to blame the king for the conspiracy to strip them of their rights and liberties.

We posted two new videos featuring the philosopher Douglas Rasmussen, one to our Libertarian View series and the other of a lecture he gave in 1991 on morality and capitalism. Here are embeds of those videos:

We also added a speech by Ted Galen Carpenter dealing with the impact of a country’s foreign policy on its domestic policies.

Libertarianism.org’s magazine section grew with the addition of Literature of Liberty, published from 1978 through 1982, first by the Cato Institute and then by the Institute for Humane Studies. Each issue begins with a long essay exploring and analyzing the literature and thought in a particular field, such as Eric Foner discussing “Radical Individualism in America: Revolution to Civil War” or John Hospers writing about “The Literature of Ethics in the Twentieth Century.” The second half of each Literature of Liberty contains a wealth of summaries of academic articles and books of interest to libertarians.

Finally, the Exploring Liberty series of introductory lectures on libertarian theory and history is now available in podcast form, so you can listen on the go. It’s on iTunes as well as direct from the Exploring Liberty podcast feed.

As always, you can keep up to date with Libertarianism.org on Facebook, Twitter, via RSS, or by visiting the site.

This Week at Libertarianism.org is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During last night’s GOP presidential debate, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney had a polite disagreement over Romneycare’s impact on free-ridership in Massachusetts. The short version: Santorum was right. Romney and even FactCheck.org disputed Santorum’s claim, but they misunderstood it.

The exchange comes 2:15 into this video from Kaiser Health News:

Here’s the Kaiser Health News transcript:

SANTORUM: Just so I understand this, in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated as a condition of breathing in Massachusetts, to buy health insurance, and if you don’t, and if you don’t, you have to pay a fine.

What has happened in Massachusetts is that people are now paying the fine because health insurance is so expensive. And you have a pre-existing condition clause in yours, just like Barack Obama.

So what is happening in Massachusetts, the people that Governor Romney said he wanted to go after, the people that were free-riding, free ridership has gone up five-fold in Massachusetts. Five times the rate it was before. Why? Because…

ROMNEY: That’s total, complete…

SANTORUM: I’ll be happy to give you the study. Five times the rate it has gone up. Why? Because people are ready to pay a cheaper fine and then be able to sign up to insurance, which are now guaranteed under “Romney-care,” than pay high cost insurance, which is what has happened as a result of “Romney-care.”

ROMNEY: First of all, it’s not worth getting angry about. Secondly, the…

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: Secondly, 98 percent of the people have insurance. And so the idea that more people are free-riding the system is simply impossible. Half of those people got insurance on their own. Others got help in buying the insurance.

FactCheck.org writes:

Romney is right. The percentage of insured residents in the state went up from 93.6 percent in 2006, the year the law was enacted, to 98.1 percent in 2010. And data from the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy show a 46 percent decline in the number of free care medical visits paid for by the state’s Health Care Safety Net. The number of inpatient discharges and outpatient visits under the program went from 2.1 million in 2006 to 1.1 million in 2010 (see page 12)…

A Santorum campaign spokesman pointed us to a Wall Street Journal column by Michael F. Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute, who stated that “Massachusetts reported a nearly fivefold increase in such free riding after its mandate took effect.” But that doesn’t square with official data just cited. Cannon didn’t specify the time period and so may have referred to some temporary or transitory bump in free riders. We will update this item if we are able to get more information from Cannon.

Speaking of facts, here’s a fun one: both Kaiser Health News and FactCheck.org unnecessarily flank “Romneycare” with quotation marks when it appears within a quote from Santorum. As if Santorum had used quotation fingers. Adorable. But I digress.

Romney and FactCheck.org failed to consider that there are different types of free riding. One type happens when government guarantees access to emergency-room care: people show up to get care, and they don’t pay. Another type happens when government guarantees people the ability to purchase health insurance at standard rates no matter how sick they are: people wait until they are sick to purchase health insurance and drop it right after they get the care they needed. These free riders pay far less than they would in a free market, which would not allow such behavior. Romney and FactCheck.org assumed Santorum meant the former type of government-induced free riding, when he was clearly talking about the latter.

The data that Santorum and I cite come from a report by the Massachusetts Division of Insurance. See this June 2010 blog post, where I quote the Boston Globe:

The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.

The result is that insured residents of Massachusetts wind up paying more for health care, according to the report.

“The active members subsidize some of the costs tied to those individuals who terminate within one year,” the report says…

The number of people engaging in this phenomenon — dumping their coverage within six months — jumped from 3,508 in 2006, when the law was passed, to 17,177 in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.

Actually, it more than quadrupled: 17,177/3,508≈4.9. But whatever. Santorum was right.

One might object that these numbers seem like small potatoes compared to the apparent drop in visits paid from the Commonwealth’s Health Care Safety Net program. Fair point. But the type of free riding Santorum identified is incomparably worse than the kind that happens in hospital emergency rooms. When people can wait until they are sick to purchase insurance, overall premiums rise so high that the health insurance market collapses in an “adverse selection death spiral.” That’s how Obamacare destroyed (and is destroying) the market for child-only coverage in dozens of states. It’s why Obamacare’s CLASS Act collapsed years before it collected a single premium. It’s happening very slowly in Massachusetts, but it is happening. And it will happen to all private health insurance under Obamacare. In contrast, as I mention in my Wall Street Journal piece, the ER-type of free riding increases health insurance premiums by “at most 1.7 percent,” according to the Urban Institute. That’s not ideal, but it’s not catastrophic.

One might also object that this latter type of free riding can’t be a problem since Romneycare has increased the number of Massachusetts residents with health insurance coverage. Also a fair point. But not only can adverse selection occur at the same time that coverage is expanding, it has the potential to completely undo those coverage gains over time. Moreover, some of Romneycare’s supposed coverage gains might be people who are actually uninsured but conceal that fact from government surveys rather than admit to unlawful behavior. These are the ultimate free riders: they’re not even paying the fine. In this Cato Institute study, Aaron Yelowitz and I found evidence consistent with such concealment behavior in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

Romneycare & Free Riders is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato Institute scholars Malou Innocent, Chris Edwards, Neal McCluskey, Ilya Shapiro, Jerry Taylor, Dan Mitchell and Dan Ikenson respond to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address.

Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.

Cato Institute Scholars on the State of the Union 2012 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last night, Newt Gingrich praised the Chilean Social Security system, which allows workers to save for their retirements in personal accounts, rather than contribute to the government pension scheme. Several of my Cato colleagues are far more qualified than I am to comment on that system, including Mike Tanner, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Jose Pinera–who designed and implemented it. But personal accounts are as important for reforming compulsory health insurance schemes like Medicare as they are for reforming compulsory pension schemes.

In 2010, I traveled to Chile to deliver an address to the International Federation of Pension Fund Administrators (FIAP).  I detailed the harms caused by compulsory health insurance schemes and explained how personal medical accounts would improve health care and generate wealth even for the poor:

In designing health care markets, perfection is not an option. Under any system, whether state-run or the free market, some patients will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Personal medical accounts can help fill in those cracks by enabling innovations that improve medical care and bring it within reach of the poor. Yes, some will not earn enough to provide for themselves. And when we are free to make our own decisions, a small number of people will make poor decisions. I believe we have a moral duty to care for patients who could not or would not provide for themselves. Personal medical accounts will make it easier for us to meet that moral duty.

Under compulsory health insurance schemes, those cracks widen, and more people fall through. Price and exchange controls block innovation. Governments waste resources on low-value medical care. Some would describe these as the unavoidable costs of creating an equitable society. But those wasted resources do not purchase solidarity. They purchase sickness and poverty.

FIAP turned my address into this book chapter, which also explains how to craft a system of personal medical accounts.

For current enrollees, who have not built up savings in a personal medical account, Congress should make Medicare look more like Social Security. That is, the government should subsidize Medicare enrollees by giving them cash, rather than creating a complex health-insurance scheme that effectively lets government officials shape the entire health care sector.

Personal Accounts–for Medicare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Congratulations to Wikipedia for going dark for a day in protest of the “online piracy” bills being considered in Congress.

But what do we do for information today? You know, we’ve gotten used to being able to find information now. So here’s an idea: Try the original encyclopedia, the one written (in most cases, ahem) by scholars and experts, Britannica.

You could start with their article on libertarianism. Or indeed their article on censorship. And then move on to the columns that I wrote there for most of 2011, on such topics as the debt ceiling crisis, the French Revolution, the founding documents of the United States and the Communist Party of China, the false charge of isolationism, marriage equality in 1967 and 2011,  government waste (“this is the business you have chosen“), the Stonewall protests, the triumph of feminism, and why Keynes threw towels on the floor. Good heavens — that ought to keep you busy on Wednesday.

And then Thursday at noon, as Wikipedia and other sites reopen, you can go down to Capitol Hill at noon to see a panel of experts explain what’s wrong with the bills that the websites are protesting.

Today, at Least, Britannica Rules the Web is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In recent years, drone warfare technology has made tremendous strides, allowing modern war to be conducted in many respects by remote control.

This may seem like a boon to technologically savvy countries like the United States, and in a sense it clearly is. But the moral calculus of war is rarely that simple. While drones can and do shield front-line troops from danger, and can often substitute for them entirely, they also have other effects. Drones can make it more likely that we will enter into wars, for example, and if so, then it’s no longer clear that they help the ordinary soldier. Drones may increase casualties among noncombatants; their pinpoint accuracy is only as good as the human intelligence behind them, which now may be more subject to manipulation, not less. And drones are also available to hostile states and nonstate actors, including terrorist groups like Hezbollah.

To discuss these issues, Cato Unbound this month has assembled a panel of experts on drones and ethics of war. Our lead essay is by David Cortright of the University of Notre Dame; he is joined by Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, as well as Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, who will contribute on Friday; and Tom Barry of the Center for International Policy, whose reply will appear on Monday.

Conversation will continue throughout the month, so be sure to subscribe via RSS if you want to see the discussion as it happens.

Drone Warfare at Cato Unbound is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Should information be withheld from academic journals because of the potential that it might fall into the hands of terrorists? The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has asked the journals Science and Nature to keep certain details out of reports they intend to publish about experiments that produced a human-transmissible version of a flu virus that is deadly about 50 percent of the time.

The NSABB said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.” This government panel has not sought to ban the release this information, so we’re not talking about formal censorship, but the request is at an early point on the censorship continuum.

It would seem that withholding this information from academic journals might do some good. But the limiting factor on production of a newly transmissible virus is training in virology (or whatever) and access to the equipment that allows such work to be done—not access to data about the technique used in these experiments. Whether it’s published in these journals or not, a criminal/terrorist virologist would probably be able to access the data using the subterfuge of having a genuine scientific interest.

So, to stop terrorists accessing bioweapons do we limit training in virology? Control laboratory equipment as dual-use civilian/military technology? No, because the massive weight of training and equipment—something approaching, if not actually, 100 percent—will go to people who will use these things to make us safer, even if a one-off tries to use virology skills to make us unsafe.

It’s a close call, and I’m not entirely certain about what I’ve just said, but this is a more difficult logic puzzle than most people think. Given the overwhelming majority of good people using information for good, diffusion of information will almost always be good. I doubt that the NSABB has sufficiently considered the costs of withholding information about the modified virus from people who would use that information to secure against its modification by whatever invention they bring to bear. (I can’t cite the invention because it hasn’t been invented yet!)

This is akin to the gun control issue. Consensus goes against guns because they make a loud bang and often draw blood when they’re used harmfully, but they are utterly silent in their beneficial use of deterring crime and violence, which is what they do the vast majority of the time. The idea of a massive epidemic strikes our primal imaginations with fear, while the notion of scientists converting diffuse knowledge into security against epidimics is a somber intellectual exercise.

Speaking of imagination, the idea of the terrorist super-villain is widespread, but imaginary. It’s important to remember that the 9/11 terrorists had box cutters. They had no idea their attack would produce the collapse of the twin towers, though many people reasoned backwards from that devastation to give them sophistication (and motivations) they didn’t actually have. It’s our psychology/imagination that gave terrorists access to chem/bio/rad/super-weapons over the last decade, a notion that almost certainly infects the considerations of the NSABB.

It’s probably a mistake to withhold scientific data from publication. We’re rather more safe from the threat of biological terrorism than most people think, and we’d get marginally safer from having information about virus experiments easily available to any researcher who might use it to discover ways of making us even safer.

(Related: Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies has a great contrarian piece in the Cato book Terrorizing Ourselves about the counterproductive mania around bioweapons, though his points don’t easily sync up with what I’ve said here.)

Withholding Scientific Data: Good Idea or Not? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Back in September, I rated Congress on how well it is publishing information about its deliberations and decisions. “Needs Improvement” was the understated theme.

Now we’re looking at the government’s publication of data that reflects budgeting, appropriations, and spending. “Needs improvement” isn’t just understated in this area. It’s really, really understated.

On the budgeting, appropriations, and spending transparency report card I’m putting out today, B+ is the best grade—and it goes to just half of one subject area. There are 2.5 Cs, 3 Ds, and 4 incompletes. This area needs improvement.

What is transparency, anyway? In my briefing paper, “Publication Practices for Transparent Government,” I wrote about the publication practices that support transparency. They are: authority, availability, machine-discoverability, and machine-readability. That means putting good data out from a consistent source in sensible ways, and, especially, structuring the data so that computers can interpret it.

You know what the World Wide Web is? It’s a whole bunch of structured data. If you want the kind of breakthrough in transparency for government data that the Web was for communications, you want the data structured right.

Our draft structure for data in this area is in our “Conceptual Data Model of the U.S. Federal Government Budgetary Process.” (HTML version, Word version)

Structured data doesn’t really exist yet in the area of budgeting, appropriating, and spending. The one bright spot is the president’s annual budget submission, which includes some information in a workable structure, but there is much room for improvement even there.

Because I’m so nice, I’ve given a lot of “incompletes” where I could have—and some say should have—given Fs. Believe it or not, there is NO federal government “organization chart” that is published in a way computers can use. That’s one of the building blocks of computerized oversight, and its absence is easily rectified.

When we return to these issues in the summer or fall of next year, and review more formally how Congress and the administration have done on transparency, I expect these things to be fixed. (Fear the blog post!)

In the meantime, here’s a run-down of the grades and why they were given. A Hill briefing today might be available online at the page for the event. (It’s somewhat symbolic that the room we have on Capitol Hill is ill-equipped for live-streaming, but we’re going to try.)

I’ve alternated in this post between “I” and “we” because I’ve gotten so much help on this. People from OMB Watch, the National Priorities Project, and the Sunlight Foundation have helped a great deal with this project, to name a few—and omit many others! The grades, the commentary, the errors, the misstatements, and omissions are all mine. And there are going to be plenty of gaps in this work. That’s why this is a blog post and not a formal Cato publication.

How well can the Internet access data about the federal government’s budgeting, appropriating, and spending? In consultation with transparency experts, the Cato Institute’s director of information policy studies, Jim Harper, rated how Congress and the administration publish key spending-cycle data in terms of authoritative sourcing, availability, machine-discoverability, and machine-readability.

These criteria envision a world where there is one authoritative source for each category of information. Unfortunately, what spending data there is appears in a lot of sources that have grown up haphazardly. There might even be some sources we don’t know about. Future grades will undoubtedly reflect improvements in what researchers, reporters, websites, and the public at large can see and use, aided by their computers.

Agencies: I

Federal agencies are the “agents” of Congress and the president. They carry out federal policy and spending decisions. Accordingly, one of the building blocks of data about spending is going to be a definitive list of the organizational units that do the spending.

Is there such a list? Yes! It’s Appendix C of OMB Circular A-11, “Listing of OMB Agency/Bureau and Treasury Codes.” But this list is a PDF document that is found on the Office of Management and Budget website.

Believe it or not, there is NO federal government “organization chart” that is published in a way amenable to computer processing!

There are distinct identifiers for agencies in both the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget. Either of these could be published as the executive branch’s definitive list of its agencies. This fruit is hanging so low that a gopher could snack on it without leaving its hole, but nobody seems to have thought of publishing data about the basic units of the executive branch online in a machine-discoverable and machine-readable format.

A pathological excess of generosity spurs us to give this category an “incomplete” rather than a straight F. We expect improvement in publication of this data, pronto.

Bureaus: I

The sub-units of agencies are bureaus, and the same situation applies to data about the offices where the work of agencies get divided up. Bureaus have identifiers. It’s just that nobody publishes a list of bureaus, their parent agencies, and other key information for the Internet-connected public to use in coordinating its oversight.

Again, an “incomplete” in this area will quickly convert to an F if this gap in data publication is not soon rectified.

Programs: I

The work of the government is parceled out for actual execution in programs. Like information about their parental units, the agencies and bureaus, data that identifies and distinguishes programs is not comprehensively published.

There is some information about programs available in usable forms. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance website (www.cfda.gov) has useful aggregation of some information on programs, but the canonical guide to government programs, along with the bureaus and agencies that run them does not exist.

This is a little bit heavier a lift than agencies and bureaus—the number of programs exceeds the number of bureaus by something like an order of magnitude (much as the number of bureaus exceeds the number of agencies). And it might be that some programs have more than one agency/bureau parent. But today’s powerful computers can keep track of these things—they can count pretty high! And the government should figure out all the programs it has, keep that list up to date, and publish it for public consumption.

Until it does, the program category gets an “incomplete” and the threat of a future F. (Or maybe a D thanks to the CFDA.)

Projects: D-

Projects are where the rubber hits the road. These are the organizational vehicles the government uses to enter into contracts and create other obligations that deliver on government services.

Some project information gets published—we finally have an item that is not incomplete—but the publication is so bad that we give this area a low grade indeed.

Information about projects can be found. You can search for projects by name on USASpending.gov, and descriptions of projects appear in USASpending/FAADS downloads. (“FAADS” is the Federal Assistance Award Data System), but there is no canonical list of projects that we could find. There should be, and there should have been for a long time now.

The generosity and patience we showed with respect to agencies, budgets, and programs has run out. There’s more than nothing here, but programs get a D-.

Budget Documents — Congress: D / White House: B+

The president’s annual budget submission and the congressional budget resolutions are the planning documents that the president and Congress use to map the direction of government spending each year. These documents are published authoritatively, and they are consistently available, which is good. They are kind-of machine-discoverable, but they are not terribly machine-readable.

The appendices to the president’s budget are published in XML format, which vastly reduces the time it takes to work with the data in them. That’s really good. But the congressional budget resolutions have no similar organization, and there is low correspondence between the budget resolutions that Congress puts out and the budget the president puts out. You would think that a person—or better yet, a computer—should be able to lay these documents side by side for comparison, but you can’t.

For its use of XML, the White House gets a B+. Congress gets a flat D.

Budget Authority—Congress: C- / Executive Branch: D

“Budget authority” is a term of art for what probably should be called “spending authority.” It’s the power to spend money, created when Congress and the president pass a law containing such authority.

Proposed budget authority is pretty darn opaque. The bills in Congress that contain proposed budget authority are consistently published online—that’s good—but they don’t highlight budget authority in machine readable ways. No computer can figure out how much budget authority is out there in pending legislation.

Existing budget authority is pretty well documented in the Treasury Department’s FAST book (Federal Account Symbols and Titles). This handy resource lists Treasury accounts and the statutes and laws that provide their budget authority. The FAST book is not terrible, but the only form we’ve found it in is PDF. PDF is terrible.

Congress can do a lot better, but because some of the publication basics are there, we give it a C-. The administration gets a D for publishing the obscure FAST book in PDF.

Ideally, there would be a nice, neat connection from budget authority right down to every outlay of funds, and back up again from every outlay to its budget authority. These connections, published online in useful ways, would allow public oversight to blossom.

Warrants, Apportionments, and Allocations: I

After Congress and the president create budget authority, that authority gets divvied up to different agencies, bureaus, programs and projects. How well documented are these processes? Not well.

An appropriation warrant is an assignment of funds by the Treasury to a treasury account to serve a particular budget authority. It’s the indication that there is money in an account for an agency to obligate and then spend.

Where is warrant data? We can’t find it. Given Treasury’s thoroughness, it probably exists, but it’s just not out there for public consumption. We’ve again generously given this area an “incomplete.”

An apportionment is an instruction from the Office of Management and Budget to an agency about how much it may spend from a treasury account in service of given budget authority in a given period of time.

We haven’t seen any data about this, and we’re less sure that there is some. There should be. And we should get to see it. Incomplete.

An allocation is a similar division of budget authority by an agency into programs or projects. We don’t see any data on this either. And we should. Incomplete.

Step up, Executive Branch, or we’ll convert these incompletes to very low grades, indeed…

Obligations: C+

Obligations are the commitments to spend money into which government agencies enter. Things like contracts to buy pens, hiring of people to write with those pens, and much, much more.

There are several different data sources that reveal obligations: FAADS/FAADS+ and CFDA, for example. But their numbers don’t match up, and—unless you’re going to have each agency uniformly publish its own data—obligations shouldn’t be published in different places. It’s hard to consider either one authoritative (even if the law says they both are). FAADS+/FPDS (via USASpending.gov), CFDA, and FPDS (the Federal Procurement Data System) are online and stable, but they are potentially incomplete because not all agencies may report to them. The use of proprietary DUNS numbers also weakens them in terms of availability.

Just sorting through all the acronyms can get you down. Ask data experts to get into the quality of each data source, and you’ll be boggled by the questions regarding which agencies’ obligations are reported at which source, whether given sources dumb down the data by excluding small dollar amounts or by aggregating data about smaller agencies. Some sources are more timely than others. Etc. etc. etc.

All these issues frustrate transparency. Data about obligations is not clean, complete and well documented. The ideal is to have one source of obligation data that combines the strengths of all the existing sources and that includes every agency, bureau, program, and project. With a decent amount of data out there, though, useful for experts, this category gets a C+.

Parties: D+

Of course, you want to know where the money is going. That is what we’re calling the “parties” category. (“Parties” sounds kinda fun, don’t it?)

Right now, reporting on parties is dominated by the DUNS number. That’s the Data Universal Numbering System, which provides a unique identifier for each business entity. It was developed by Dun & Bradstreet in the 1960s. It’s very nice to have a distinct identifier for every entity doing business with the government, but it is not very nice to have the numbering system be a proprietary one.

Parties would grade well in terms of machine-readability, which is one of the most important measures of but because it scores so low on availability, its machine-readability is kind of moot. Until the government moves to an open identifier system for recipients of funds, it will get weak grades on publication of this essential data.

Outlays: C-

For a lot of folks, the big kahuna is knowing where the money goes: outlays. An outlay—literally, the laying out of funds—satisfies an obligation. It’s the movement of money from the U.S. Treasury to the outside world.

Outlay numbers are fairly well reported after the fact and in the aggregate. All you have to do is look at the appendices to the president’s budget to see how much money has been spent in the past.

But outlay data can be much, much more detailed and timely than that. Each outlay goes to a particular party. Each outlay is done on a particular project or program at the behest of a particular bureau and agency. And each outlay occurs because of a particular budget authority. Right now these details about outlays are nowhere to be found.

Now, there are plenty of people inside the government who are very familiar with the movement of taxpayer money in the government. They will be inclined to say, “it’s more complicated than that,” and it is! But it’s going to have to get quite a bit less complicated before these processes can be called transparent.

The time do de-complicate outlays is now. It’s another feat of generosity to give this area a C-. That’s simply because there is an authoritative source for aggregate past outlay data. As the grades other areas come up, outlay data that stays the same could go down. Waaaayyy down.

Government Spending Transparency: ‘Needs Improvement’ Is Understatement is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month we’re talking macroeconomics at Cato Unbound. Tim Congdon kicks things off with an essay about the confused legacy of John Maynard Keynes. We have been told, again and again, that the United States is in a liquidity trap — because the federal funds rate can’t go below zero.

There are several problems with this often-repeated claim. First, even at a federal funds rate of zero, other instruments of monetary policy remain effective. Second, a central bank lending rate of zero is not at all what Keynes himself meant when he used the term “liquidity trap.” Third, what Keynes did mean is a source of considerable ambiguity, as necessitated by the simplified model he presented in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. And finally, a liquidity trap that conforms to his model may never actually occur, at least not in the strict sense.

Advancing these claims is Tim Congdon, the United Kingdom’s leading monetarist and author of the recent book Money in a Free Society. He is joined by three other prominent economists, each with a slightly different view of the issue. They are Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Don Boudreaux of George Mason University; and Robert Hetzel, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or at other venues. Trackbacks are enabled. We also welcome your letters and may publish them at our option. Send them to jkuznicki at cato.org

Monetary and Fiscal Policy at Cato Unbound is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• There are bigger budgetary fish to fry than how much Congress spends on itself.
• I’ve been looking for serious proposals from members of Congress to terminate programs. I’m not finding much.
• The federal government’s involvement in education should be ended—not reformed.
• Chris Edwards on the flaws in the data being used in the income inequality debate.
• The U.S. Postal Service sends a message to Congress.

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This Week in Government Failure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) proposed and passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act forty years ago, he almost certainly believed that the law would fix the problems he cited in introducing it. It hasn’t. The bulk of the difficulties he saw in credit reporting still exist today, at least to hear consumer advocates tell it.

Advocates of sweeping privacy legislation and other regulation of the information economy would do well to heed the lessons offered by the FCRA. Top-down federal regulation isn’t up to the task of designing the information society. That’s the upshot of my new Policy Analysis, “Reputation under Regulation: The Fair Credit Reporting Act at 40 and Lessons for the Internet Privacy Debate.” In it, I compare Senator Proxmire’s goals for the credit reporting industry when he introduced the FCRA in 1969 against the results of the law today. Most of the problems that existed then persist today. Some problems with credit reporting have abated and some new problems have emerged.

Credit reporting is a complicated information business. Challenges come from identity issues, judgments about biography, and the many nuances of fairness. But credit reporting is simple compared to today’s expanding and shifting information environment.

“Experience with the Fair Credit Reporting Act counsels caution with respect to regulating information businesses,” I write in the paper. “The federal legislators, regulators, and consumer advocates who echo Senator Proxmire’s earnest desire to help do not necessarily know how to solve these problems any better than he did.”

Management of the information economy should be left to the people who are together building it and using it, not to government authorities. This is not because information collection, processing, and use are free of problems, but because regulation is ill-equipped to solve them.

Information Regulation that Hasn’t Worked is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The day after Thanksgiving didn’t see one of these updates, so we’ve got two weeks of new content at Libertarianism.org to cover.

George H. Smith continued his Excursions series with the first two parts in an extended look at the Declaration of Independence. In part 1, Smith discussed the intellectual history behind the document’s famous reference to “unalienable” rights. In part 2, he turned to two instances of curious wording: the use of “self-evident” and the lack of “property” in Jefferson’s list of inalienable rights.

We had a few new videos, too. In an addition to our “Libertarian View” series, Penn Jillette—magician and H. L. Menken research fellow at the Cato Institute—talks about what he sees as the important distinction between trying to convince someone that what you believe is true and just stating sincerely what you believe.

On November 29, we posted our first talk from Thomas Szasz. Speaking in 1994, the famous psychiatry skeptic addressed the problem of socialism in health care—an issue very much with us today.

And just today, we added a talk by Roger Garrison on monetary policy and central banking.

Finally, we had an extended—and ongoing—debate in the Free Thoughts blog between Julian Sanchez and Miles Pope on conceptions of morality in Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea.

As always, there’s much more at Libertarianism.org. Keep up to date with everything new on the site by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

This Week at Libertarianism.org is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This week at Libertarianism.org,

• George H. Smith published another in his Excursions series of original essays, this time looking at the question of whether Thomas Jefferson was a plagiarist.
• John Samples wrote about equality and political speech, particularly attempts to increase the former by restricting the latter. “Tax financing of campaigns is a lot like establishing a religion: citizens are forced to act contrary to their deepest convictions in service to some alleged greater good,” Samples wrote. “I assume that such compulsion has no place in a liberal society.”
• Jason Kuznicki blogged about NPR’s recent story on Ayn Rand, writing, “If you don’t like what you hear about Ayn Rand in this story, you probably won’t like her, either. If you do like what you hear, or if you just find it intriguing, then you should definitely read further.”
• Miles Pope continued his careful analysis of Jan Narveson’s social contract defense of a free society, The Libertarian Idea.

This Week at Libertarianism.org is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at PolicyMic, Cato scholar Daniel J. Mitchell debates Demos co-founder David Callahan on whether massive government bailouts saved us from a second Great Depression, or plunged the economy into a prolonged recession that hurt taxpayers and undermined the self-corrective mechanisms of the market. Mitchell argues:

The Bush-Obama policies of bailouts and regulation have been bad for taxpayers, but they’ve also been bad for the economy.

A vibrant and dynamic economy requires the possibility of big profits, but also the discipline of failure. Indeed, capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell.

Yet that’s what politicians from both parties have created. Profits are private and losses are socialized, so is anyone surprised that Wall Street responds to these incentives with imprudent risk?

Read Mitchell’s post here, and the other side here.

Demos vs. Cato: Say No to Bailouts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

David Friedman, the author of  Hidden Order, Law’s Order, and Future Imperfect, will speak at the Cato Institute on Tuesday, November 29, at noon. His topic will be “The Market for Law.”

Is there a market for good law? Without the state providing law, could it be offered by multiple, private, and competing agencies? David Friedman, professor of law at Santa Clara University, explored this idea in his classic 1973 book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism. But in the years since, he’s revised and strengthened some of his theories. In this talk, he will offer these new ideas from the last 30 years of thinking about the market for law.

David Friedman is always interesting and provocative. Register now! And note: because of our ongoing expansion project, this event will be held one block east of Cato at the Undercroft Auditorium, 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW.

Read more about David Friedman at Libertarianism.org.

David Friedman at Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you haven’t already visited our new website, Libertarianism.org, you should check it out. And if you have already visited, note that there’s new material going up all the time. One of the most interesting parts of the site for long-time libertarians will be a continuing stream of  never-before-seen videos of talks by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and more. In his 1983 lecture, Hayek talks about the evolution of morality. In a 1990 talk to the International Society for Individual Liberty, Friedman chides Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises for what he considers dogmatism and an absence of humility. I was at that speech, and I remember it generated a lot of discussion afterward.

But there’s more! Weekly columns on the history of libertarian ideas by George H. Smith. Classic essays from Robert Nozick, Julian Simon, and Milton Friedman — not to mention Herbert Spencer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft — on various aspects of liberty. Recommended reading lists on introductory books, libertarian theory, history, and the most incisive critics of libertarianism. And of course I can’t resist recommending my own 20-minute talk, exclusive to Libertarianism.org, “An Introduction to Libertarian Thought,” in our video series Exploring Liberty.

More “Exploring Liberty” videos will be coming soon. Editor Aaron Ross Powell has written an introductory blog post with highlights – but I encourage you to just click over and look around. And over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, we’ll be adding much more to Libertarianism.org, including new videos, books, and essays. If you’d like to stay up to date, we’re on Facebook and Twitter.

Libertarianism: It Isn’t Just for Books Any More is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama claims to support America’s exporting and so-called “green jobs” industries, but he also likes rules that restrict the importation of critical inputs to those industries. Austin Bragg and I produced a short video detailing how antidumping duties serve to nudge American manufacturers offshore or out of business. The examples we cite are American manufactured products that fall squarely into the category of “green.”

Facebook it. Tweet it. And read more of Dan Ikenson‘s heavy lifting on the antidumping issue here, here and here.

The Antidumping Lobby’s Power to Destroy Jobs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This month at Cato Unbound, we mark a milestone in U.S. public policy. Last month, for the first time ever, the Gallup polling organization recorded 50% support for legalizing the sale of recreational marijuana to adults. (Medical marijuana has had majority approval for many years now.)

So why now? What’s changed lately to bring so many people around? And where are we going from here?

To discuss these questions, we’ve invited a quartet of marijuana reform activists to a roundtable discussion. Each will present an essay on a different facet of marijuana policy, and our conversation this month will be about political strategy, possible future trends, and the interplay among various sub-issues in the field.

Kicking things off will be Paul Armentano of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), writing about the biomedical aspects of cannabis and its prohibition. He will be followed by former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition; Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, who will discuss public education and messaging; and Morgan Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project, who will discuss upcoming ballot initiatives and legislative developments.

Although each of the four is fairly well in the same camp on this issue, each also brings to the table different experiences, different perspectives, and different areas of expertise. We hope you will find a discussion among them educational and thought-provoking.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or at other venues. Trackbacks are enabled. We also welcome your letters and may publish them at our option. Send them to jkuznicki at cato.org

Cannabis Policy at Cato Unbound is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• Dan Mitchell says that sequestration would be a small step in the right direction.
• The Senate vote on rural development subsidies symbolizes just how unserious most policymakers are when it comes to making specific spending cuts.
• Republican hypocrisy on energy subsidies.
• Government cost overruns: One reason to shift infrastructure financing to the private sector is that governments and their contractors often give taxpayers the shaft.
• The Military-Industrial Complex yells “jobs!” in a crowded federal budget.

Follow Downsizing the Federal Government on Twitter (@DownsizeTheFeds) and connect with us on Facebook.

This Week in Government Failure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog