Archive for the ‘General’ Category
By Edict of King Andrew, New York Employers Will Be Subject to ObamaCare’s Employer Mandate
Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the New York Times:
When Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) created a new ObamaCare “exchange” by executive order, it was indeed “A Deft Health Care Move” [Apr. 18].
Really, what was he supposed to do? Let legislators decide whether to commit taxpayers to such an expense? (They had declined.) Sit back and let the federal government pay for its own Exchange? (That was the alternative.) Block a $3,000-per-worker tax on employers? (Had Cuomo done nothing, New York employers would have been exempt from ObamaCare’s “employer mandate.”)
Cuomo brilliantly and single-handedly volunteered New Yorkers to pay for a new government bureaucracy and burdened New York employers with a new, job-killing tax. Who needs a legislature!
It’s Illegal to Say ‘None of Your Damn Business’
The government’s troops are rallying behind the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. “After the House voted this month to defund a major part of the U.S. Census Bureau, the agency is taking the threat very seriously,” reports the Washington Times, “with its supporters in both business and government rallying to preserve the annual questionnaire.”
Wait. Who could be against the Census Bureau? Its constitutional charter is to enumerate citizens every ten years for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This is a necessary and unremarkable administrative function.
Oh, wait—again. Government bloat is a law of gravity, and the Census Bureau does far, far more than count noses. Its American Community Survey has made the Census Bureau the research arm for the welfare/redistribution state and a source of corporate welfare in the form of demographic data about Americans.
So Census goes around asking people dozens of questions that have nothing to do with the agency’s constitutional purpose.
The ACS is controversial enough among the strongly principled that Census has a Web page entitled: “Is the American Community Survey legitimate?” Their answer: “Yes. The American Community Survey is legitimate. It is a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.” (Did you know there’s a whole class on the “appeal to authority” at Fallacy University?…)
The real authority they cite is Title 13 of the U.S. code, which, in section 221, allows the government to fine people who refuse to answer the Census Bureau’s questions. It’s illegal to say “none of your damn business” when a government official comes around asking about your toilet. I’ve written many times, in long form and short, that the helping hand of government strips away privacy before it goes to work.
So it’s nice to see that Rand Paul (R-KY) in the Senate and Ted Poe (R-TX) in the House have introduced a bill to make the American Community Survey voluntary, unless it’s a question that the Census actually needs for its constitutional purposes. Reading public comments on the House bill is particularly interesting. There is a good number of people who want to be left well enough alone. They shouldn’t be subject to penalties for saying so. It’s a matter of principle and privacy.
If You Love Something, Set It Free: A Case for Defunding Public Broadcasting
Available today is my new policy analysis, “If You Love Something, Set it Free: A Case for Defunding Public Broadcasting.” As a long-time fan of public broadcasting, particularly NPR, it has often irked me that public broadcasting spends so much time embroiled in political battles. The recent kerfuffles over Juan Williams’s controversial dismissal from NPR and the sting videos of NPR executives making derogatory remarks about the Tea Party were only the latest episodes in a long line of political squabbles that goes back to the very beginning, 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act.
From the standpoint of politicians, however, political fights over public broadcasting’s content are not bugs, they’re features. Just as “war is the health of the state,” politicians view a politically controlled, sufficiently chastened public broadcasting system as a healthy one. During the debates over the Public Broadcasting Act, Sen. Norris Cotton (R-N.H.) explained how politicians would approach public broadcasting:
If this bill becomes law, . . . and if, as time goes on, we have occasion to feel that there is a slanting, a bias, or an injustice, we instantly and immediately can do something about it. First, we can make very uncomfortable, and give a very unhappy experience to, the directors of the corporation. Second, we can shut down some of their activities in the Appropriations Committee and in the appropriating process of Congress . . . . The Corporation is much more readily accessible . . . to the Congress, if it is desired to correct any injustice or bias which might appear.
As Senator Cotton’s remarks show, from the very beginning public broadcasting was intended to be politicized. In fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was partly created to provide a politically controlled voice in the marketplace of ideas.
Prior to the advent of government funding, noncommercial, education television thrived, with National Educational Television (NET) being the most famous. In the mid-to-late 60s, NET emerged as a strong counter-cultural voice. It challenged America’s role in Vietnam, it produced scathing documentaries about poverty, and it attacked members of Congress with ties to big banking. In order to maintain its independence from political influence, NET often refused federal funding.
With the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, President Johnson created a system that would use politically influenced funding to challenge NET’s iconoclastic programming. Later, President Nixon took keen interest in whether “anti-administration” broadcasts were broadcast either on NET (which took some federal money after the CPB was created), or the fledgling PBS. At one point, Nixon’s anger at unfriendly broadcasters caused him to veto funding to the CPB (Congress overrode the veto).
Forty years later, public broadcasting still works under the same system. There is, however, one marked exception. Both PBS and NPR have excelled at lowering their government dependency by finding non-governmental sources of money, primarily in the form of listener fund drives, foundations, and corporate underwriting. As a percentage of their operating budgets, the size of the federal contribution to public broadcasting is quite small, around 15%. As a percentage of the total federal budget, the ~$440 million for public broadcasting is little more than a rounding error.
So why should we even care about public broadcasting in this era of trillion-dollar deficits? Because the content of public broadcasting has always been and will always be significant to Americans. Public broadcasting carries the government’s imprimatur, and those who feel left out of programming are more than simply upset at not being heard; they have a valid object on principle to not being included in the “national message.” Conservatives most often raise this challenge, but similar complaints also come from the left-wing Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting (CAMERA), and others.
Freeing public broadcasting from federal funding would foreclose the ability of these groups and others to object on principle to public broadcasting’s content. Freedom from federal funding would allow public broadcasters to air edgy programming, controversial stories, and more hard-hitting critiques of the current administration’s policies. Finally, freedom from federal funding would not mean that PBS and NPR become corporate controlled. Instead, they would simply become noncommercial, nonprofit entities doing more of what they already do very well: raise money through donations. A five-year defunding period would allow for the needed internal changes, as well as set up the biggest fundraising event in public/noncommercial broadcasting’s history.
In short, if you love something, set it free.
Getting Serious about Fixing Washington
Demonstrating once again that it’s nothing if not the voice of the capital’s establishment, the Washington Post this morning opened its Sunday “Outlook” section with yet another major piece by establishment apologists Norman Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings), lamenting our “dysfunctional” politics and blaming it mostly on “extremist” Republicans who oppose “almost everything put forward by the Democrats.” Only three weeks ago the Post splashed a companion piece by the two across that Sunday section, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” And in the interim, Post associate editor Robert Kaiser wrote a glowing review of their new book on “the new politics of extremism” while several Post bloggers were pushing their thesis in their own posts. It must be an election year. (For a legal analogue of the Ornstein/Mann political thesis, see my “When All Is Politics, Nothing Is Law,” posted late Friday by the Daily Caller.)
Having set forth their critique three weeks ago, Ornstein and Mann today list five things that “won’t fix Washington” and four things that will. Four of the five that “will never work,” they say, are a third party, term limits, a balanced-budget amendment, and public financing of elections to restrain special interests. Read and judge for yourself whether their arguments are sound. They begin that fourth point, for example, by noting that “in the post-Citizens United world, the financing of political campaigns is a nightmare.” True, but the constitutional principles upheld by Citizens United aside, it seems not to have occurred to them that the welter of restrictions that they and others of their persuasion have promoted over the years go far toward explaining that nightmare.
The four things Ornstein and Mann believe will work begin, no surprise, with “realistic” campaign finance reform, including more disclosure and stricter enforcement of current law. From there they move on to redistricting reforms, restricting the Senate filibuster rules, and expanding the electorate by, among other things, fining or rewarding citizens so more will go to the polls, the idea being that “boosting overall turnout would help tilt the balance back toward where most Americans actually are: closer to the middle.” The upwards of half of all Americans who don’t vote are “closer to the middle”? If you’ve ever seen Jay Leno’s “man-on-the-street” interviews, you may want to question that—and question too whether encouraging such people to vote will solve many problems.
Here too, judge for yourself concerning all of those essentially structural proposals that Ornstein and Mann believe won’t and will work to correct our dysfunctional politics. I’ve saved for last the fifth of the things they say will never work because, in truth, it’s not really a structural proposal, like the others, but rather a perspective—and it leads to substantive issues that establishment people like Ornstein and Mann seem not to want to address. Their suggestive heading for this fifth thing that won’t work is “Stay calm—things will get back to normal eventually.” Those of this view argue that “acrimony and gridlock are built-in features of our political system” that wax and wane, Ornstein and Mann write; thus the 111th Congress “was extremely productive, passing health-care reform, financial regulation and an economic stimulus package.” They counter, however,
that an examination of the Obama presidency suggests that we are experiencing neither politics as usual nor an odd blip. We are witnessing unprecedented and unbalanced polarization of the parties, with Republicans acting like a parliamentary minority party opposing almost everything put forward by the Democrats; the near-disappearance of the regular order in Congress; the misuse of the filibuster as a weapon not of dissent but of obstruction; and the relentless delegitimization of the president and policies enacted into law.
Indeed, they contend that with “the defeat of problem-solvers such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and the emergence of take-no-prisoners partisans such as Richard Mourdock, there is no reason to think the system will correct itself anytime soon.”
The thing to note in all of this is just what Ornstein and Mann count as “normal”—it’s government as “problem solver,” Congress as “extremely productive.” But that’s precisely the vision of government that is under assault today—and has been at least since Barry Goldwater challenged the “get-along, go-along” Republican establishment in 1964. Yet in truth that post-New Deal world that the establishment so longs to return to was the anomaly. We have “gridlock” today because the post-Goldwater challenge has finally reached critical mass. And that’s what the Washington establishment has yet to grant—witness its dismissal of Goldwater, its initial dismissal of Ronald Reagan, and its dismissal today of the Tea Party.
Still, it’s not problem solving as such that these anti-establishment “obstructionists” oppose—indeed, there’s no shortage of problems to be solved. Rather, it’s doing so through the big-government “solutions” that have given us those problems to begin with. Whatever the merits of the structural reforms establishment types like Ornstein and Mann are offering, their critique hardly explains our dysfunctional politics. Now that the opposition has reached critical mass, it’s increasingly clear that we have gridlock because the nation is deeply divided not over structure but over substance—over the very role of government. The establishment’s faith in government—in what are essentially public “solutions” to private problems, the core of progressivism—is under assault as never before, because that faith has come up dry. It’s long past time for the establishment to grasp that, because the reality that so animates the opposition—the ever growing deficits and debt the progressive faith has produced—is fast closing in upon us. And the inability of the Washington establishment to deal with it, except through more of the same government schemes that produced it, is the dysfunction that should most concern us all.
The Wall Street Journal’s Limited-Government Readers
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, usually a strong voice for limited government, was rapped by readers Thursday for positions that didn’t seem to meet that standard.
After the Journal urged President Obama to support the Defense of Marriage Act in order to allow the gay marriage issue “to be resolved democratically by the states,” Michael Weisberg wrote to point out that DOMA “overrides the laws and desires of the states, which have traditionally had jurisdiction in matters of marriage, as one would expect under the federal Constitution.” That’s a point we’ve also made here, and one that seems to confuse many of DOMA’s advocates.
Meanwhile, many readers objected to the Journal‘s support for the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (also a point we’ve made in this space). Adam Marcus and Berin Szoka of TechFreedom noted that Census data aren’t as private as we’re promised:
Our government has abused census data to awful effect, most notably in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, as documented in a Scientific American article in 2007. More recently, the feds violated their express privacy policy by publishing all individual responses to the 1940 Census’s similarly extensive questions—not just aggregated results.
Like Robert L. Umbarger, they also point out that “the Constitution authorizes a census only to apportion congressional representatives,” so the government exceeds its authority when it requires Americans to answer questions on, as the Journal put it, “everything from demographics to income to commuting times.” Lisa Greenman reflects a traditional American suspicion of government:
At worst it is the federal government collecting private, personal data that can be used against its citizens. How ironic this piece was published under the one titled “The President’s Hit List.”
Van Bussmann notes, “Here comes yet another program to solidify government control over our lives. Information begets power.” He unconsciously echoed Sir John Cowperthwaite, the former administrator of the British colony Hong Kong during its rapid rise from poverty, about whom the Journal editorial page wrote in 2006, “One of the better known stories about the undeservedly obscure Cowperthwaite was his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats.”
It’s good to know that even when the Journal editorial writers are tempted by unwarranted federal programs, their readers are on the case.
And Don’t Come Back!
Just when you thought the soak-the-rich arguments couldn’t get any more perverse, now comes a bill introduced this morning by Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey, CNNMoney is reporting, “that would prevent [Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin] from ever returning to the United States.” The Brazilian-born Saverin became a U.S. citizen in 1998, but he’s been living in Singapore since 2009. He’s been in the news lately because he renounced his U.S. citizenship earlier this year, presumably to avoid income and capital gains taxes on his Facebook shares, which go on sale tomorrow.
As CNN describes the “Ex-PATRIOT Act:”
The proposal says that if a wealthy American seeks to renounce their [sic] citizenship, it will be presumed they have done so for tax purposes, unless the individual can convince the IRS otherwise.
If the person is unable to convince the IRS, they will be subject to 30% capital gains tax on future U.S. investments no matter where they live. Furthermore, they will not be allowed back into the United States. “Period,” Schumer said. “They could not set foot in this country again.”
Ingrate! In fact, that’s pretty much how Schumer looks at it:
“Saverin has turned his back on the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him, and helped him become a billionaire,” Schumer said. “This is a great American success story gone horribly wrong.”
Do you suppose that what’s “gone horribly wrong” is a tax system that encourages people like Saverin to leave? Ask the people leaving California, Illinois, and New York.
Selling Work Visas: Auctions or a Tariff?
Yesterday Professor Giovanni Peri presented an immigration reform plan that would auction work visas to employers. As I wrote yesterday, Peri’s plan would diminish the misallocation of current visas but not do much to increase the quantity of work visas. Since the real problem with America’s immigration system is a lack of work visas and green cards, Peri’s plan seeks to solve a rather miniscule problem by comparison.
Proponents of selling visas either support auctioning a limited number of visas to the highest bidders or establishing a tariff that sets prices but allows the quantity to adjust. An immigration tariff is far superior to an auction of numerically limited work visas. You can read my proposal in more detail here or listen me explain it here.
Here are three reasons why an immigration tariff is better than an auction:
First, a tariff is the most market friendly way of restricting work visas. Limiting the government’s role to setting the price of work visas, allowing the purchased quantities to adjust, would make for a much more market-friendly and flexible system. A tariff would decrease immigration relative to open borders, but misallocation isn’t a big concern because immigrants with the most to gain would pay the tariff.
Second, an immigration tariff is more economically efficient because the quantity of work visas would adjust to market demand unlike an auction of numerically limited work visas. When there is economic growth more people would buy work visas to keep pace with labor demand. In slow economic times the number of visa purchases would automatically shrink. With an immigration tariff, there is no need for a government commission to somehow figure out how many are demanded. They can just set the price and let the market figure out the quantity.
Third, an auction system will not do much to diminish unauthorized immigration going forward. An immigration tariff allows immigrants, temporary workers, American businesses, and families to plan ahead, save, borrow, and pool resources to pay the tariff. Tariff prices will change, no doubt, but they won’t change all of the time as they would under Peri’s system. An auction would provide less price certainty, fewer guarantees of entering legally, and incentivize more unauthorized immigration than a tariff.
Selling Work Visas
Professor Giovanni Peri today made an interesting proposal to auction work visas to the highest bidding employer. His reform is similar to an auction proposal made by Gary Becker, but more specific. His idea is innovative and deals with transitioning from the current maze of quotas, visa categories, and other barriers to a more open system that better allocates visas to the highest bidders.
The one problem with Peri’s proposal is that it does not meaningfully increase the number of work visas. The limited number of work visas, not the distribution, is the main problem with America’s immigration system. Instead, he calls for reallocating visas from families to the employment based category. He then wants American employers to bid for the limited quantity of work visas issued quarterly. A government commission would adjust the quantity and immigrants would be free to move between employers who purchase visas.
Economists like Becker and Peri are rightly concerned with how societies allocate scarce resources to different uses, but the scarcity of work visas is an artificial one created by the government, not one that results from a scarcity of the factors of production or other inputs. This is why there should be no numerical limits on the quantity of work visas issued even if they are priced. Charging for work visas is a substantial improvement over the current system, as I say here, here, here, and here. Most of the welfare gains come from allowing the quantity of visas to adjust to the price, not the other way around. An efficient visa selling process will operate more like a tariff than an auction.
For normal goods and services, a rising price incentivizes consumers to limit their consumption and producers to increase production. A government commission tasked with adjusting visa quantities would face political rather than market incentives and not increase visas in response to rising prices. Unless the incentives are carefully aligned, the result would probably be a more arbitrary and numerically limited immigration system.
Another problem with Peri’s proposal is that it only allows employers to bid for work visas. Immigrants should also be able to bid because they have the most to gain from migrating and have a better notion of their value on the labor market. Immigrants already pay to be smuggled into the United States—some Chinese pay $75,000 per person—so that money might as well be collected by the federal government instead of a coyote. If employers buy visas for specific immigrants, contracts or bonds can effectively guarantee compliance.
Peri’s proposal is a thoughtful and serious attempt to reform immigration but it does not address the main problem with our immigration system: too few work visas.
Another Fairly Insane Cross-National Health Care Comparison
Yesterday, countless newspapers published a really disappointing story by Noam Levey that the Los Angeles Times ran under this title:
The article is little more than a puff piece for the hotly contested idea of universal coverage. It gives zero space to the competing strain of thought that the less the government does for the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable, the better off they will be.
It quotes “Dr. Julio Frenk, a former health minister in Mexico and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health” as saying, “As countries advance, they are realizing that creating universal healthcare systems is a necessity for long-term economic development.” A necessity? Gosh. It’s a wonder the United States ever became the world’s largest economy.
It speaks of such government guarantees as being popular, when what it really means to say is that people are dependent on the government for their health care and frightened to death that someone might take it away.
It laments the fact that the United States is an “outlier” because it fails to guarantee access to health care for all citizens, which “stands in stark contrast to America’s historic leadership in education…Long before most European countries, the United States ensured access to public schooling.” Yet it makes no mention of how U.S. students fare poorly in comparison to those in other advanced countries.
It devotes no time to the costs of such guarantees, other than to say that they are sometimes “more than twice what was expected.” But don’t worry, those costs are borne by the government. It does not say where governments get all that money. I guess we’ll never know.
Speaking of taxes, it makes no mention of how taxes suppress economic development. Evidently, unlike other taxes, those that support government-run health care systems do not incur the deadweight loss of taxation.
But the article was at its most ridiculous when it suggested that the health care sectors in poor countries like Rwanda and Ghana might possibly be ahead of the United States in any way whatsoever. As I have written about Rwanda:
The United States generates many of the HIV treatments currently fighting Rwanda’s AIDS epidemic, as well as other medical innovations saving lives there and around the world. More than any other nation, we create the wealth that purchases those and other treatments for Rwandans and other impoverished peoples. The United States is probably closer to providing universal access to medical care for its citizens — and, indeed, the whole world — than Rwanda. Rwanda’s “universal” system leaves 8 percent of its population uninsured. Though official estimates put the U.S. uninsured rate at 15.4 percent, the actual percentage is lower; and again, uninsured Americans typically have better access to care than insured Rwandans. The real paradox is here that Rwandan elites think the United States is doing something wrong.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the Rwandan elites. For my thoughts on how sensible people can make such insensible comparisons between the United States and other nations, read the rest of my post on Rwanda.
Live Tonight at 6: Brian Doherty and Rand Paul
Tonight at 6:00 pm ET, Brian Doherty will discuss his new book Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, with comments by Sen. Rand Paul, in Cato’s Hayek Auditorium.
You can, as always, watch it live at www.cato.org/live.
But if you prefer the old-fashioned, 20th-century technology of television, it appears that C-SPAN will broadcast the event live. And probably again later in the evening, as is their wont.
Television schedules always subject to change, of course.
Universal Dependence or Universal Access?
There’s a rift within the U.S. school choice movement as to whether private school choice programs should cover every child or focus only on the poor. Fortunately, the cause of this disagreement is not so much that the two sides have different goals but that they have different assumptions about what will achieve those goals. And the nice thing about assumptions is that they can very often be tested against the real-world evidence. What actually works better: universal access to the education marketplace, or universal dependence on a government program? That’s the question I try to answer over at the RedefinEd blog today, in a post responding to veteran voucher campaigner Howard Fuller.
Stop Using Slippery-Slope Arguments? Where Would that End?
Richard Thaler writes in the New York Times:
Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym…Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take effect?
Yes annnnd…yes. Next question.
Surely, the justices have the conceptual resources to draw a distinction between the health care market and the market for broccoli. And even if they don’t, then all the briefs, the zillions of blog posts and a generation’s worth of economic literature can help them.
If drawing a constitutionally meaningful distinction between the markets for health insurance and broccoli is child’s play for Thaler, he should school all the brief- and blog-post-writers who so far have failed. That would have been a more productive use of his thousand words than his build-up to this thesis:
If you are opposed to a policy, state your case based on the merits — not on the imagined risk of what else might happen down the road. The path of that road is so unpredictable that it may even produce a U-turn.
Good grief. Slippery-slope arguments are about principles. As in, “If you concede this principle because you don’t mind the result here, you will no longer have it to protect you against that bad result there.” Thaler’s thesis would lead, for example, to all manner of civil-liberties violations by the state because there simply isn’t enough political support to protect all the civil liberties of various minorities. But Thaler doesn’t want us to think about things like consequences or the future.
The potential for U-turns makes no more sense as an argument against invoking slippery slopes principles, because principled arguments can help generate the U-turn that opponents of, say, ObamaCare want to see.
I take silly arguments like this to be evidence that ObamaCare supporters are in complete panic mode.
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