Archive for the ‘Political Philosophy’ Category
Pork or Bags of Cash?
I’ve been noodling through a government reform thought experiment, but can’t seem to reach a conclusion. See what you think…
The reform would address that most nefarious dynamic: When the benefits of government spending are concentrated and the costs are dispersed, government will grow and spending will increase.
Mancur Olson described this dynamic more than 40 years ago in The Logic of Collective Action. Steve Slivinski, in his new book Buck Wild, summarizes Olson’s idea as follows:
Olson pointed out that the disparity in incentives between taxpayers and what we now call “special interests” results from an inherent disadvantage of the larger group (i.e., taxpayers) compared to the smaller group (i.e., recipients of public dollars) in its ability to organize to defend its interests. It is this inherent bias in favor of the small special interest groups that provides a very robust explanation of why we still have Big Government, even though many taxpayers would prefer smaller government. “It would be in the best interest of those groups who are organizing to increase their own gains by whatever means possible,” writes Olson. “This would include choosing policies that, though inefficient for the society as a whole, were advantageous for the organized groups because the costs of the policies fell disproportionately on the unorganized.”
To borrow an example from Steve’s book, the National Endowment for the Arts had a 2004 grant budget of $47.4 million — equal to about 0.01% of income taxes. The NEA awarded 1,970 grants that year, so the average grant amount was $24,000. Grant recipients would thus have considerably more financial incentive to lobby for continuing the NEA than individual taxpayers, who on average contribute less than a buck per year to the program, would have to lobby for discontinuing it.
Welcome to the Blackout Period! NOT
Today McCain-Feingold’s 60-day window on electioneering communications opens. Perhaps a better metaphor would be that the window slams shut.
An electioneering communication is a broadcast ad that mentions a candidate for federal office. Until election day you cannot sponsor an electioneering communication unless you meet certain conditions specified by federal election law.
Practically, this part of McCain-Feingold means business corporations, labor unions, many interest groups (which are incorporated), and groups that receive money from corporations or unions may not fund ads mentioning candidates for federal office. The same groups also may not sponsor ads urging citizens to contact their member of Congress about an issue if that member is running for re-election.
Defenders of McCain-Feingold (and a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court) have argued that the electioneering communication rules do not prohibit political speech. After all, these groups can simply form a political action committee or use other available alternatives to sponsor the advertising.
Maybe, maybe not. In 2000, a donor gave the NAACP a multi-million dollar gift that was used to fund ads criticizing a candidate for federal office, George W. Bush. Under McCain-Feingold, the NAACP would have had to raise that multi-million dollar donation under federal law including disclosure requirements and contribution limits. Raising money under those constraints is much harder than receiving a single gift from one donor. Given those difficulties, the NAACP might well have not raised as much money with a PAC as they did in 2000 from that one contributor. Of course, funds that are not raised cannot be spent on political speech.
Make Way, Peasant!
Remember Bill Clinton’s $200 haircut? In 1993 the new president, who had run as a populist, kept LAX travellers waiting as stylist-for-the-stars Cristophe sculpted the presidential ‘do aboard Air Force One. Of course, the real outrage wasn’t how much Clinton spent on the cut (who cares?) but that he and his staff thought the president getting a haircut was reason enough to keep hundreds of ordinary Americans waiting on the tarmac so AF1 could take off first. Who do these people think they are?
But for the protests of Virginia transportation officials, Washington-area commuters might have found themselves asking a similar question last week. Unlike the Cristophe kerfuffle, in this case the plan to inconvenience thousands of Americans came from Secret Service, not the president himself. The Washington Post reports that on Tuesday “the Secret Service asked Virginia officials if they would be kind enough to shut down all of the HOV lanes on I-395 from 1 to 7 p.m. the next day so President Bush could get where he needed to be.” Which was a fundraiser for Sen. George Allen. State traffic experts described the likely results of acceding to the Secret Service request:
“There will be approximately 8,600 cars using the HOV lanes over a three hour period (4 to 7 pm). This equates to approximately 20,000 to 22,000 people. If the HOV lanes are closed, according to the District’s estimate the back up of traffic in the general purpose lanes will not be cleared until 10 p.m.”
Even so, it apparently took them quite a while to talk the Secret Service down from the plan.
As Melanie Scarborough discussed in a 2005 Cato Briefing Paper [.pdf], the idea of establishing a permanent corps of federal agents dedicated to protecting the president proved surprisingly controversial, even after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901:
Sen. Stephen Mallory (R. FL) said, “I would object on general principles that it is antagonistic to our traditions, to our habits of thought, and to our customs that the president should surround himself with a body of Janizarries or a sort of Praetorian guard and never go anywhere unless he is accompanied by men in uniform and men with sabers as is done by the monarchs in the continent of Europe.” The House Judiciary Committee objected to the proposal that a cabinet secretary send presidential protectors “among the people to act under secret orders. When such laws begin to operate in the Republic, the liberties of the people will take wings and fly away.”
That sort of rhetoric may seem a little anachronistic today. Clearly, the 21st century president needs a professional personal security detail. But when that security detail makes clear that it couldn’t care less how much it inconveniences 20,000 commuters, so long as the president gets to his fundraiser on time–and that it cares still less about Americans’ free speech rights–you might begin to think that Mallory et al. had a point.
Against Forcing Voters to be Free
Around election time pundits begin to fret about low voter turnout in the United States. Norman Ornstein has even called for mandatory voting, complete with sanctions. The voters should be, as it were, forced to be free.
Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy shows why such concerns are misplaced. We should be worrying, Ilya says, about the rational ignorance of voters who do go to the polls. His longer argument about voter ignorance may be found here.
Political Governance vs. Corporate Governance
A New York Times columnist says it may be a mistake to try “to make government run more like a business.” Citing research by Matthias Benz and Bruno S. Frey, summarized by Larry Yu, the Times says that government works better than the private sector:
The authority over government is split among the branches of government. In business, Mr. Yu writes, “even if directors have stepped up their governance in recent years, institutional norms still stack the deck in favor of C.E.O.’s.”
And while chief executives and directors can serve forever, politicians need to face re-election regularly.
When it comes to corporate governance, maybe there is something to be learned from governments.
Well, let’s see. According to a Booz Allen study, dismissals of corporate CEOs have risen sharply in the past decade. Among the world’s 2,500 largest public companies, “CEOs are as likely to leave prematurely as to retire normally. Continuing a pattern from 2004, in 2005 nearly half of all CEO departures were due to poor performance or mergers.”
Meanwhile, almost no members of Congress are removed from office involuntarily. As this chart shows, House reelection rates are approaching 100 percent.
Does that mean that the U.S. government is performing so much better than the average company that there’s no need for change? It seems unlikely that even the Times columnist would make that claim. No, if you read the links above from Booz Allen and the Washington Monthly, you can see some of the differences between politics and business: Business is competitive, to begin with. There are 2,500 large companies in the survey, all competing with one another and with millions of upstart challengers. If Sears and K-Mart don’t stay on their toes, Target and Wal-Mart will take their business. Wikipedia lists pages and pages of defunct companies, all of which failed to satisfy customers. Executives lost their jobs, and shareholders lost their money, and those realities are a powerful incentive to executives and shareholders of other companies. Corporate boards are getting more aggressive, and different companies are testing different rules for governance — outsider CEOs, separating the jobs of CEO and chairman, acquisitions, divestitures, going public, going private — in an attempt to find the rules that will produce the greatest customer satisfaction and thus the greatest profits.
Contrast that with government. Failed bureaucrats are almost never fired; indeed, the standard response to bureaucratic failure is to appropriate more money for the agency. Gerrymandering, campaign finance restrictions, and taxpayer-funded constituent service and propaganda make it almost impossible for a member of Congress to be turned out of office. People spend other people’s money far less efficiently than their own.
I think the Times got it backwards. It would be more appropriate to say, “When it comes to government, maybe there is something to be learned from corporate governance” — such as the value of decentralization and competition, retirement ages or term limits, and real penalties for poor performance. Since those factors are unlikely to occur in political systems, the best lesson is to keep as much of life as possible in the private sector.
Michael Gerson Thinks You Are “Morally Empty”
If you like the work of the Cato Institute, that is. “Morally empty” is how Bush’s former head speechwriter described the “small-government” aspect of small-government conservatism in this interview with Foreign Policy magazine:
It is superficially attractive. But in the long run, it’s politically self-destructive because [candidates] end up talking about the size of government while others are talking about education, healthcare, and serious public concerns. It’s morally empty because, from my tradition and political philosophy, any political movement has to have a vision of social justice and the common good in order to appeal [to people]. And government can play a part in that. I’ve seen over the last five years that it clearly can.
And in case you had caught your breath after almost six years of Bush’s foreign policy, here he is on the question “Which of the president’s speeches do you think best expresses his worldview?”
Probably the second inaugural, which he wanted to be the democracy speech—the culmination of a series of doctrines and approaches that we had defined in the previous two to three years. It talks very frankly about the necessity of democratic transformation for the future of American security. Particularly in the Middle East, the cycle of tyranny and radicalism has produced an unsustainable situation. That dynamic has to be changed, and democracy is the only way to do it. Some of it is working with authoritarian governments that may go down the path of reform, some of it is standing up for dissidents and taking the side of the oppressed, and some of it is confronting outlaw regimes that threaten the international order. This is, in many ways, the clearest crystallization of his foreign policy.
It’d be comforting to think they’ve learned their lesson, but they clearly haven’t. In case your outrage quotient isn’t yet filled, you can read this interview at Christianity Today. Gerson on the Democratic Party:
I would love to see the Democratic Party return to a tradition of social justice that was found in people like William Jennings Bryan. During that period, many if not most politically engaged evangelicals were in the Democratic Party, because it was a party oriented toward justice.
I don’t see much of that now in the Democratic Party. Instead of an emphasis on the weak and suffering, there’s so much emphasis on autonomy and choice. And so the party of William Jennings Bryan, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, I’m not sure it exists any more. But it would be good if it did.
Gerson on Republicans:
There are some members of the Republican Party who…have a much more narrow view of government’s role. It would be a shame if conservatism were to return to a much more narrow and libertarian and nativist approach.
Your Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen. Bomb-slash-democratize the Arabs, accomplish “social justice,” cure AIDS in Africa, and ban gay marriage. There’s going to be a lot of work left for the federal government, apparently, even after Bush leaves office.
Exit Against Predation
Those who have strong feelings about how wealth ought to be distributed, and who think that government policy ought to be more redistributive, often fall victim to the fantasy that their golden geese will not just wander off into another jurisdiction.
No doubt the members of the Chicago City Council are nonplussed that their attempt to squeeze large retailers has led Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Target to put their plans for new Chicago stores (and new Chicago jobs) on hold. I bet a million billion dollars that at least a few council members have lamented that they can’t legally force the big boxes to open stores within Chicago city limits. They’re learning the bitter lesson that the right of exit is a powerful check on politicians who can’t keep their hands out of other people’s pockets.
Worried about inequality? Why not really sock it to the rich? Because the rich — or their money at any rate — will just leave town. Even champions of the poor, like Bono, head for the greenest pastures:
Irish rock band U2 has transferred part of its multi-million-euro business empire out of Ireland due to changes in tax laws there, a British newspaper has said.
Fear Is the Health of the State
James Fallows has an important–and brave–piece in the new Atlantic Monthly. Important because it reports the underreported good news in the war on terror: we’re winning. Indeed, after interviewing some 60 leading terrorism analysts while researching the article, Fallows has concluded that we’ve won. And the article is brave because one subway bombing while this issue’s on the stands and Fallows’s name might become the punchline to a thousand bitter jokes about pollyannaish predictions.
But if and when another attack happens, it won’t disprove Fallows’s point: we do not now, if we ever did, face an existential threat from the likes of Al Qaeda. As he puts it, “terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage, but not destroy us. Their real destructive power lies in what they can provoke us to do.” If fear, not reason, governs our reaction to terrorism, then Al Qaeda can provoke us into launching unnecessary wars and abandoning the constitutional protections we cherish. If we proclaim this conflict World War III (or IV–the hawks appear divided on this point, if on little else), then certain consequences follow for the American constitutional order. Which is one reason why Fallows urges the abandonment of the war metaphor.
Of course, Al Qaeda is a threat that should be taken very seriously–in some ways, more seriously than the adminstration has in the past. But for nearly five years, too much of the public debate over foreign threats has been dominated by breathless hysteria. The soundbite “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” has become the tell-it-to-the-hand of constitutional debate, as if it is a given that unless we gut the document, we will be committing national suicide. Peace and liberty don’t do well in an atmosphere of panic. Fallows’s calm, sober optimism serves as a useful corrective.
Libertarian Hedges
A headline over a Washington Post editorial reads:
Hands Off Hedge Funds
Sometimes libertarians deserve to win an argument.
Gee, thanks. I’m glad libertarian arguments against over-regulation made sense to the editorial writer in this case. But I’m disappointed in the suggestion that this is a rare occasion.
Indeed, I’ll bet the editorial writer agrees with most of the basic ideas that libertarians advocate: private property, markets, the rule of law, limited constitutional government, religious toleration, equality under the law, a society based on merit and contract not status, free speech, free trade, individual rights, peace.
In the West we live in a liberal world, and in the United States we call liberalism “libertarianism.” (When Americans say “liberalism,” they mean the welfare state.) The Post’s disagreements with libertarianism are really less rare than the headline suggests; they involve how often and how much national policy should deviate from the basic principles we already agree on.
Cross-posted from Comment is free.
Not as Easy as Right and Wrong
Over at The American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias takes issue with the assertion I made yesterday that if Kansas is ever going to have peace over creationism and evolution, parents must be given the right to take their public education dollars and choose their children’s schools. Instead of forcing parents to support – and constantly fight to control – one school system, why not let them choose the institutions they want?
Yglesias argues that whether it’s parents or government that decides what children will be taught, kids will have no choice in the matter. The question to him, then, is “who is likely to teach most children the right stuff?” If it’s government, then there’s no need for choice.
That sounds reasonable enough. That is, until you consider how incredibly hard it often is to know, and to get people to agree on, what constitutes “the right stuff.” Creationists, after all, are just as sure that they are right about Darwin as evolutionists think themselves to be.
Of course, in education, Darwin is just the beginning: Is phonics-based instruction the right or wrong way to teach reading? Should American history be taught in a “traditional” way that focuses on the nation’s great achievements, or is it right to focus on the country’s flaws? What amount of time should students spend studying fine art instead of, say, physics? Is it wrong for a student newspaper to run an article critical of the school’s principal? And so on…
Clearly, when it comes to countless disputes in education, what is truly right or truly wrong is very difficult to know. With that in mind, we must answer the question: Is it better that government impose one idea of what’s right on all children, or that parents be able to seek freely what they think is right for their own kids?
At the risk of contradicting myself, I think the latter is the obvious right answer.
Republicans for Big Brother
The Cato Institute has noted for some time that conservatives and Republicans have abandoned their limited-government principles when it comes to health policy. Examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
The New America Foundation just made our job a little easier, by producing a paper titled, “Growing Support for Shared Responsibility in Health Care.” In this context, “shared responsibility” means allowing the government to force all Americans to purchase health insurance — a power the Left has craved but no government had dared assume until Massachusetts did so this year.
The paper helpfully compiles a list of comments that Republicans and Democrats have made in support of this new expansion of government power. The Republicans included:
- Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (no surpise there)
- Former Bush HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson
- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill
- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
One might add to that list the Heritage Foundation (whose health policy scholars wrote the Massachusetts mandate) and Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health Care; Political Philosophy
Hollywood for Ugly People
With the weather hotter than Hell here in Washington, and partisan warfare ramping up for the ’06 elections, there are two pieces today that help remind us what a weird, perverse place Capitol Hill, in particular, has become.
First, in this morning’s New York Times, Mark Leibovich wedges his tongue firmly into his cheek and explores the phenomenon of the “Senators Only” elevators in the Senate.
The basic rule is this: nonsenators are allowed to ride only if asked by a senator. Such invitations typically occur when a reporter is in mid-interview with a senator walking off the Senate floor.
Lobbyists have been known to park themselves outside elevators with attractive young women, the better to win invitations. To be sure, such tactics took place only in earlier eras, when senators held a less enlightened view of women.
(In 1994, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was said to have engaged in excessive touching of his then-freshman colleague Patty Murray of Washington. Ms. Murray later asked for and received an apology from Mr. Thurmond, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported at the time. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Murray declined to comment.)
[Former Louisiana senator John] Breaux concluded the matter with a nod to the public good: “I think the elevators are designed to keep members of the public from having to ride with senators,” he said.
Then, the New Republic runs a piece on the phenomenon of ostensibly pro-”traditional values” congresscritters jettisoning the ol’ ball and chain back home and taking up with nubile young Washington groupies. The piece could perhaps best be summed up by invoking
Susan LaTourette’s remarks in late 2003, after her husband of 21 years, Representative Steve LaTourette, revealed that he was having an affair with a lobbyist and wanted a divorce. “I think Washington corrupts people,” a furious Susan announced. “He was a wonderful husband and father, the best I ever saw, until he went there. … Now he’s one of them. All they care about is getting reelected. I hate them all.”
What can we do about the inflated egos, insularity, even cults of personality on the Hill? There’s a clear enough solution.
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