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The Closing of the Conservative Mind
If you’re unclear what’s wrong with conservatism these days, I urge you to check out the tragicomic dustup accidentally provoked last week by my colleague Jerry Taylor at National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog.
I don’t want to give a blow-by-blow recount of the fracas, but happily a convenient compendium of the relevant links is provided here. Go read the whole thing; you’ll be entertained, that’s for sure. For present purposes, suffice it to say that Jerry made two basic points: (1) talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are not popular outside the conservative movement; and (2) the two have a habit of making “dodgy” arguments even when their positions are sound. He might have added that the sky is blue and A comes before Z. For his effrontery Jerry was verbally beaten to a pulp by his fellow Cornerites.
The whole thing seems like an updated version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, except this time the crowd turns on the truth-telling kid and gives him the Rodney King treatment. And that response to Jerry’s innocent and obvious points captures the essence of what has gone wrong with the conservative movement. That the flagship publication of the movement will brook no criticism of demagogic blowhards like Limbaugh and Hannity says it all: A movement founded on the premise that “ideas have consequences” has suffered a calamitous decline in intellectual standards.
Richard Posner agrees. In a recent blog post, he offered this withering assessment of the state of the conservative mind:
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of managment and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
I don’t endorse every detail of Posner’s bill of indictment, but the broad thrust is correct. Movement conservatism has regressed to something like the days before National Review was founded — back when Lionel Trilling could say that conservatism consisted of nothing but “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” And as Jerry’s trip to the woodshed demonstrates, those gestures can be very irritable indeed! Conservatism today has degenerated into a species of especially unattractive populism, pandering to the pro-torture-and-wiretapping, anti-gay-and-Mexican prejudices of a dwindling, increasingly sectarian, increasingly regional “base.”
Some who sympathize with libertarian and free-market causes are cheered by the anti-government rhetoric and Tea Party theatrics now increasingly in evidence on the right. Perhaps, they think, the old Goldwater-Reagan conservatism is making a comeback. Sorry, but I seriously doubt it. On the contrary, I worry that good free-market ideas are going to get tainted by association with an increasingly brutish identity politics for angry white guys and the women who love them.
In order to make gains for the cause of limited government, we need to convince smart people that we are right. We need to win the battle of ideas in the intellectual realm by making better arguments than our opponents, and we need to educate the public so that it is less susceptible over time to “rational irrationality.” None of this can be accomplished by consorting with and apologizing for merchants of intellectual junk food, or by making common cause with some of the ugliest cultural attitudes in contemporary America. Greater economic freedom will not come with pitchforks and torches; it will come, as it has in the past, by reshaping the elite consensus.
Will the Government Be the New King of All Media?
Howard Stern swore off free broadcast radio in 2004 in part because of federally mandated decency rules. The self-annointed “king of all media” may have stepped off the throne in doing so. Them’s the breaks in the competitive media marketplace, contorted as it is by government speech controls.
Some would argue that a new king of all media is seeking the mantle of power now that the Obama administration is ensconced and friendly majorities hold the House and Senate. The new pretender is the federal government.
And some would argue that the Free Press “Changing Media Summit” held yesterday here in Washington laid the groundwork for a new federal takeover of media and communications.
That person is not me. But I am concerned by the enthusiasm of many groups in Washington to “improve” media (by their reckoning) with government intervention.
Free Press issued a report yesterday entitled Dismantling Digital Deregulation. Even the title is a lot to swallow; have communications and media been deregulated in any meaningful sense? (The title itself prioritizes alliteration over logic — evidence of what may come within.)
“Gangster Government” at Work
With the Obama administration preferring to rely on politics rather than the law to “fix” the auto industry, bondholders have discovered that the new politics of this administration is quite a bit more brutal than the old politics practiced by the Bush administration.
Henry Payne and Richard Burr write of “gangster government” using not just demagogic public attacks on greedy bondholders but apparent threats of regulatory sanction to get its way in bankruptcy court. They explain:
The holdout debtholders sought the refuge of the courts, where decades of bankruptcy law promised that secured lenders would receive just compensation for their investment. But then Obama called in his fixers.
In his April 30 news conference, Obama singled out Chrysler’s self-described “non TARP lenders” as “speculators” who sought to imperil Chrysler’s future for their own benefit. “I do not stand with them,” Obama thundered. “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. . . . (not) those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.” Michigan Democratic allies like Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Rep. John Dingell piled on, calling the lenders “vultures.”
Then, on Detroit radio host Frank Beckmann’s show May 1, a lawyer for the lenders, Tom Lauria, chillingly revealed how “one of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.”
Lauria later confirmed the threats came from Rattner and that the target was Perella Weinberg, which had suddenly withdrawn its opposition after the president’s April 30 press conference.
The White House denied the threats, but Business Insider subsequently reported that “sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.”
“The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler,” continued the Insider story, “say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person described the administration as the most shocking ‘end justifies the means’ group they have ever encountered. . . . Both were voters for Obama in the last election.”
The idea of the White House–with the IRS and SEC at its disposal–threatening investment firms should have sent off alarm bells in America’s newsrooms. Inexcusably, the media establishment largely ignored the hardball tactics. This is the same media that has doggedly reported on President Bush’s U.S. attorney firings and the post-9/11 interrogations of terrorist suspects.
I have no opinion on who should get what as part of Chrysler’s bankruptcy — other than that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for America’s version of lemon socialism so common around the world. But crude political interference by the political authorities in Washington in a bankruptcy case erode the rule of law and administration of justice. If Obama and company believe that the end justifies the end when it comes to handing the auto companies over to favored interests, who among us is safe from similar action by this or another administration in the future?
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Civil Liberties Surge
There’s encouraging news in recent polls about two civil liberties issues — marriage equality and marijuana legalization — and it’s got some observers talking about “tipping points” and “a bandwagon effect.”
Take marijuana: A poll released yesterday by Zogby and the O’Leary Report found that 52 percent of respondents would favor legalizing marijuana, with 37 percent opposed. That’s the first poll I’ve seen that found a majority in favor. (The poll was released in a full-page ad in The Hill newspaper on May 6 and does not appear to be online. It had a sample of 3,937 voters from the 2008 election, weighted to reflect the election outcome. Presumably it was an online poll, but if it had any bias it appears to be in a conservative direction: other results included 57 percent support for the “tea parties,” 71 percent opposition to new gun control laws, 57 percent opposition to cap-and-trade, and 53 percent opposition to legislation that would pressure radio stations to provide “diversity.” Of course, it’s kind of scary that only 53 percent of respondents opposed ideological censorship of radio.)
Whatever you think of that poll, it’s not the only one. In February, Nate Silver posted a chart of polls on legalization, showing a slow but steady rise, up to about 40 percent. A Field poll in April showed that 56 percent of Californians support legalizing and taxing marijuana, the first time Field had ever found a majority in favor. The poll was largely on budget issues, and voters may have been desperately searching for new revenue sources other than general tax hikes. Also in April an ABC News/Washington Post poll found 46 percent of respondents in favor of legalizing the use of small amounts of marijuana, an all-time high in that poll.
The New York Times points to other signs of change on the marijuana front: Pot has become essentially legal for anyone in California who can tell a medical marijuana clinic that it would make him feel better. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the federal government would back off its attempt to enforce the federal laws against medical marijuana in the 13 states that have legalized medical use. The threats to prosecute Michael Phelps for a bong hit were widely ridiculed. These developments have led Andrew Sullivan and CBS News to speculate about a “tipping point” for change — at last — in marijuana prohibition. Just this week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said there should be a major study of the possibility of legalization.
Meanwhile, TPM and AOL’s PoliticsDaily also see a tipping point for marriage equality. A majority of New Yorkers now join Gov. David Paterson in supporting same-sex marriage. That same ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that “in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it versus 46 percent opposed — the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.”
New at Cato
For more content from Cato, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
- In the Boston Herald, Jeffrey A. Miron argues that states should balance their budgets by cutting spending rather than raising taxes.
- In the Detroit News, Doug Bandow argues that strengthening our economic ties with South Korea could increase American influence over the region even as China’s power grows.
- Listen to Will Wilkinson comment on the Chrysler bankruptcy on American Public Media’s Marketplace.
- Watch Dan Mitchell discuss offshore tax havens on The Today Show.
- Join the Cato Institute on June 1 for a conference on the lessons we can learn from the New Deal and the Great Depression.
- In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Jason Kuznicki discusses the newest edition of Cato Unbound.
Cato and the Bailouts: A Correction for the NY Times ‘Economix’ Blog
At the New York Times Economix blog, economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts writes:
The libertarian Cato Institute often emphasizes the issue of corporate welfare, but it’s remained remarkably quiet so far on the topic of bailouts.
Excuse me?
Since she linked to one of our papers on corporate welfare, we assume she’s visited our site. How, then, could she get such an impression? Cato scholars have been deploring bailouts since last September. (Actually, since the Chrysler bailout of 1979, but we’ll skip forward to the recent avalanche of Bush-Obama bailouts.) Just recently, for instance, in — ahem — the New York Times, senior fellow William Poole implored, “Stop the Bailouts.” I wonder if our commentaries started with my blog post “Bailout Nation?” last September 8? Or maybe with Thomas Humphrey and Richard Timberlake’s “The Imperial Fed,” deploring the Federal Reserve’s help for Bear Stearns, on April 14 of last year?
Cato scholars appeared on more than 90 radio and television programs to criticize the bailouts during the last quarter of 2008. Here’s a video compilation of some of those appearances.
Folbre complains that some people seem more concerned about welfare — TANF, in the latest federal acronym — than about welfare for bankers — TARP. Google says that there are 138 references to TANF over the past 13 years or so on the Cato website, and 231 references to TARP in the past few months.
Now she has a legitimate point. Welfare for the rich is at least as bad as welfare for the poor. And as much as welfare for the poor has cost taxpayers, the new welfare for banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and automobile industries is costing us more. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times has written that “reassignment,” an economic policy that changes individuals’ ranking in the hierarchy of incomes, is far more offensive than a policy of redistribution, which in his idealized vision would merely raise the incomes of the poorest members of society. By that standard, taxing some businesses and individuals to subsidize the high incomes of others is certainly offensive. Of course, Brittan underemphasized the harm done by welfare to people who become trapped in dependency. But there’s good reason to oppose both TANF and TARP, and Cato scholars have done both.
Lest the good work of Cato’s New Media Manager Chris Moody go under-utilized, here’s a probably incomplete guide to Cato scholars’ comments on the bailouts of the past few months. (Note that it doesn’t include blog posts, of which there have been many.) Quiet? I don’t think so:
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Work, Social Production, and Inequality
Matt Yglesias links to an interesting discussion about the growth of activities that raise our standard of living without being captured in economic statistics. Wikipedia is a great example of this: it’s tremendously valuable to hundreds of millions of Internet users, but because it’s given away for free that value is not reflected in our economic statistics.
I think this general insight is right, but I don’t agree with John Quiggin’s conclusions about the social implications. In particular, Quiggin writes:
It seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes.
If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours.
The first point ignores the fact that rich people are a crucial part of many public-spirited enterprises. Jimmy Wales was able to finance the initial development of Wikipedia (then called Nupedia) because he had previously earned profits building commercial websites. The Ubuntu project, creators of an extremely popular Linux-based operating system, is supported to the tune of millions of dollars a year by successful entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Brewster Kahle used the profits from his successful Internet businesses to build the Internet Archive, a crucial repository of public domain works. John Gilmore, who made his fortune as one of Sun’s first employees, has used his wealth to promote a variety of free software projects, including GNU radio and Gnash. I could provide plenty of other examples.
The important thing to recognize is that these projects could only exist because of the combination of their founders’ expertise and their money. Without cash, these folks would have been unable to provide the support necessary to get these projects off the ground. But even more important, these projects also wouldn’t have succeeded without their deep understanding of their fields. Only someone with years of experience in the software industry would have the judgment and the relationships necessary to make a project like Ubuntu successful.
Obama’s Lobbying Bonanza
The Bush administration was good to lobbyists, especially in its final year, when lobbyists earned $3.2 billion, the most ever. But the Obama administration promises to be even better, according to those who follow the field. Marketplace Radio reports:
Washington lobbyists earned a whopping $3.2 billion last year. That’s the highest amount in the decade tracked by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Executive Director Sheila Krumholz says interest groups spent $17.4 million on lobbying every day Congress was in session last year. And with Washington on a spending spree, companies are boosting their influence on Capitol Hill.
SHEILA KRUMHOLZ: There was this unique opportunity that government was handing out money and anytime that happens, companies will spend what they must to get in line to get a piece of the pie.
And that’s expected to continue. Craig Holman is a governmental affairs lobbyist with the non-profit group Public Citizen.
CRAIG HOLMAN: The amount spent on lobbying is not related to the disclosure or the regulation of the lobbying profession. It is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.
That’s right. Even the Naderite Public Citizen understands that “the amount spent on lobbying . . . is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”
Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill goes on, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say…. With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”
Or, as F. A. Hayek explained the process 65 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”
And just who is doing all this lobbying? The Center for Responsive Politics says that health and pharmaceutical companies were the biggest spenders, which wouldn’t surprise lobby-watcher Tim Carney, followed by the finance, insurance, and real estate industry (even though many of those companies cut back their lobbying late in the year, after getting the moolah they came for). But, Marketplace also reports, “There’s a report out today from the Center for Public Integrity that says the number of green lobbyists has tripled in the last five years. There are nearly 2,500 people now employed trying to get their clients views heard on climate policy. Wall Street in particular sank a lot money into green.” With the economy slowing, banks were pulling back from investments in so-called renewable energy. “That is, until the stimulus package tossed it a lifeline.”
So the $3.2 billion bonanza for lobbyists in 2008 was just a precursor of the lollapalooza to come. Within three weeks of Obama’s inauguration, the Washington Post reported that more than 90 organizations had hired lobbyists specifically to influence the stimulus bill. Since President Obama has made clear that in his “blueprint for America,” the $800 billion stimulus bill is just the start of his money flow to and from Washington, we can expect lobbying expenditures to keep on rising. Federal spending will be directed by politicians to politically favored recipients. That’s just reality. If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then all this spending may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we’re taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers. That’s not a recipe for recovery.
I’ll give the last word again to Craig Holman of Public Citizen: “the amount spent on lobbying . . . is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Big Business and the Stimulus
I was asked by a radio host more than once this week what I thought of the fact that some big business leaders were standing by President Obama in his pursuit of the gargantuan “stimulus” package. There is an unfortunate public perception that supporters of free markets are knee-jerk supporters of anything that could be perceived as benefiting “big business.” As the thinking apparently goes, because free marketers favor business, and members of the business community favor the stimulus, shouldn’t free marketers therefore favor the stimulus?
Hardly. In his book, The Myth of the Robber Barons, historian Burton Folsom differentiates between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs:
A key point about the steamship industry is that the government played an active role right from the start in both America and England. Right away this separates two groups of entrepreneurs — those who sought subsidies and those who didn’t. Those who tried to succeed in steamboating primarily through federal aid, pools, vote buying, or stock speculation we will classify as political entrepreneurs. Those who tried to succeed in steamboating primarily by creating and marketing a superior product at a low cost we will classify as market entrepreneurs. No entrepreneur fits perfectly into one category or the other, but most fall generally into one category or the other. The political entrepreneur often fits the classic Robber Baron mold; they stifled productivity (through monopolies and pools), corrupted business and politics, and dulled America’s competitive edge. Market entrepreneurs, by contrast, often made decisive and unpredictable contributions to American economic development.
This afternoon I was forwarded an article regarding IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano’s public endorsement of the “stimulus” package alongside President Obama. According to Palmisano, “We need to reignite growth in our country. We need to undertake projects that actually will create jobs.”
But as the reporter noted:
Since November, Palmisano has been making a pitch to Obama’s transition team that investing $30 billion in expanding rural broadband access, computerizing health-care records and improving the electrical grid could create 949,000 U.S. jobs. [ The stimulus package] could also create billions in revenue for Big Blue, which specializes in the technology and services used for health-care IT and smart-grid infrastructure, not to mention its recent $9.6 million contract to provide broadband service in rural America.
What we see here is IBM as the political entrepreneur.
While IBM would stand to make a killing on the “stimulus,” those companies unlucky enough to be left off the government gravy train, the market entrepreneurs, will get stuck partially financing the profligacy. According to Chris Edwards, “The U.S. statutory [corporate income tax] rate is the second highest of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and by one estimate, the effective rate is the highest.” Of course, corporate taxes mean bad news for consumers, employees, and investors — not just the corporate owners, as many forget (or ignore).
Terrorism Hysteria Watch
One aim of the conference we held last week at Cato (watch it here) was to encourage the country to adopt a more grown-up approach to combating terrorism — less fear-mongering, more confidence, or as James Fallows put it, “reclaiming Gary Cooper, not Chicken Little, as our national icon.” Chicken-littleism has political causes that we can’t change. But pointing out threat inflation should at least make its authors think twice.
To that end, here are three recent examples of officials or the media hyping terrorist capability.
1. Senator Kit Bond, at Dennis Blair’s confirmation hearing as Director of National Intelligence, said the following:
Our entire way of life is just a few moments away from annihilation if terrorists succeed in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction.
Nonsense. Our way of life survived various wars, the virtual destruction of a large swath of New Orleans, and other disasters. It would survive even nuclear terrorism. Incidents of chemical or biological terrorism are unlikely to cause mass casualties, although they could, and will not collapse our institutions. The danger to American values comes more from our reaction to terrorism than the thing itself. What’s more, these sorts of incidents are not nearly as likely as you generally hear.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Obama’s Vast New Deal
Conservatives and libertarians seem to be reeling, as economic freedom takes another blow from both the outgoing and incoming administrations every day. Remember the good old days of the $1.5 billion Chrysler bailout? Heck, remember the good old days of the $700 billion financial market bailout? Barack Obama used to call for fiscal discipline and denounce “the runaway spending and the record deficits.” Now it seems the sky’s the limit. Pundits talk about whether Obama’s first deficit will come in closer to $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion, and Republican opponents are nowhere to be seen.
Throwing fiscal discipline to the winds, in his radio address Saturday Obama proposed the biggest expansion of government spending in history, ranging from roads and bridges to “a range of programs to expand broadband Internet access, to make government buildings more energy efficient, to improve information technology at hospitals and doctors’ offices, and to upgrade computers in schools.” I just hope Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats were reading the New York Times on Sunday, which actually explained the argument against such programs in its front-page news story:
Mr. Obama’s plan, if enacted, would be in part a government-directed industrial policy, with lawmakers and administration officials picking winners and losers among private projects and raining large amounts of taxpayer money on them….
President Bush and many conservative economists have opposed such large-scale government intervention in the economy because it supports enterprises that might not survive in a free market. That is the crux of the argument against a government bailout of the auto industry….
Mr. Bush and other Republicans have resisted such an approach in part out of concern for the already soaring federal budget deficit, which could easily hit $1 trillion this year. Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars today to try to fix the economy, they argue, will leave a huge bill for the next generation.
Conservative economists have also long derided public works spending as a poor response to tough economic times, saying it has not been a reliable catalyst for short-term growth and instead is more about politicians gaining points with constituents.
Alan D. Viard, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told the House Ways and Means Committee recently that public works spending should not be authorized out of the “illusory hope of job gains or economic stabilization.”
“If more money is spent on infrastructure, more workers will be employed in that sector,” Mr. Viard added. “In the long run, however, an increase in infrastructure spending requires a reduction in public or private spending for other goods and services. As a result, fewer workers are employed in other sectors of the economy.”
Such warnings don’t carry much weight when they come from President Bush, the trillion-dollar man. But fiscally responsible Republicans and Democrats would do well to read the Times article and start actually making these points. And kudos to Times reporters Peter Baker and John Broder for including such balance in their story.
Fairness Doctrine Post-Mortem
You may have noticed a recent decline in chatter about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, and some Democrats backing away from earlier pronouncements of support. Marin Cogan claims that this was all a straw man anyway, the result of right-wing fear-mongering and a “manufactured controversy.” Blake Dvorak responds by pointing to the words of Congressional leaders that really did call for a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine.
Why backtrack now? It could be that the economy, wars abroad, and serial bailout votes are crowding the Fairness Doctrine out of the agenda. It may also be that proponents of the Fairness Doctrine took a closer look and decided that they would lose a constitutional challenge.
A legal challenge to the new Fairness Doctrine would succeed for three reasons. First, the legal rationale that justified it in the first place has been overcome by technology. Second, the effect of a new Fairness Doctrine would be to restrict speech, not increase the volume and quality of discourse. Third, the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, will overturn a new Fairness Doctrine.
Technology
The Fairness Doctrine existed from 1949 to 1987 in FCC policies and regulations, requiring coverage and balanced discussion of social issues. The end of the Fairness Doctrine came as a change in FCC policy, not from a defeat in court. In fact, it survived Supreme Court review in the 1969 case Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC. The lack of bandwidth in the early days of radio and the scarcity of broadcast licenses meant that commercial broadcast license-holders had to provide opposing views when covering controversial issues.
Print editors fared better. In 1974, the Court invalidated a state statute that mandated free space in newspapers for political candidates to reply to criticism and attacks in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo. Minus the scarcity rationale, a free press cannot be forced to share its pages with opponents. As technology advanced, the policy was not applied to all media. The FCC later exempted “subscription television” (cable TV) from political access requirements in its 1978 Policy Statement.
In 1984 the Court noted that technology had advanced in FCC v. League of Women Voters of California. In a footnote, the Court acknowledged that the policy had come under criticism with the advent of cable and satellite TV, but declined to overturn the Fairness Doctrine without a signal from Congress or the FCC that scarcity was no longer a valid rationale for its imposition.
Reconstitution of the Fairness Doctrine under a scarcity rationale is laughable today. The advent of HD Radio, satellite radio, Wi-Fi radio in cars, streaming radio on cell phones, cable television (now in a majority of American households), satellite television, the internet, and streaming internet radio stations undermine any case for scarcity.
Reducing Speech, Not Enhancing It
The Supreme Court said from the outset in Red Lion that if the Fairness Doctrine ends up improperly blocking speech from public discussion, then it would be unconstitutional. Proponents of the Fairness Doctrine are pretty clearly gunning for conservative talk radio, which appears to be the only format of media that doesn’t lean left.
The enforcement of the new Fairness Doctrine would likely be the same as standards for indecency or profanity. Aggrieved listeners would file a complaint with the FCC, and the inevitable result is a deterrent against any opinion without a counterpoint commentator. Prof. Jack Balkin provides a detailed description of how broadcasters complied without increasing the quality of their broadcasts. Broad discretion as to which issues are covered and the advantage of picking your opposition make compliance easy but do not guarantee meaningful debate. In short, a radio version Hannity & Colmes would pass muster, but did Colmes ever win one of those exchanges?
The Fairness Doctrine ends up inhibiting a lively discussion of social issues. Prof. Balkin believes that the Fairness Doctrine does pass constitutional muster but remains poor public policy, and recently commented that the Fairness Doctrine is not coming back, and certainly not to the internet. Professors Eugene Volokh and Cass Sunstein agree that the Fairness Doctrine makes for bad policy in this video. Prof. Volokh has also asked Fairness Doctrine supporters how media outlets would accommodate multiple viewpoints beyond the traditional left-right divide.
Simply put, this is a measure that will restrict speech, and no amount of civic education window-dressing can hide that.
Supreme Court Composition
Under the current composition of the Court, the Fairness Doctrine is unlikely to survive.
This can only be fleshed out in an article of its own, but the bottom line is that the Court has recently held unconstitutional campaign finance reform measures that were far narrower than the Fairness Doctrine. In FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the Court invalidated part of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 with respect to issue advocacy. In Davis v. FEC, the Court invalidated the “millionaire’s amendment” of the same act, a provision giving fundraising advantages to political candidates facing wealthy opponents.
Some may contend that I’m erring in making a connection between campaign finance and broadcast restrictions that inevitably come with a federal license. But it’s hard to argue that these restrictions on political expression, which impact some advocacy groups and some political candidates, would be invalidated while a 24/7 restriction on a whole medium of communication on all controversial social issues would be upheld as constitutional. Even harder when you take away any argument under a scarcity rationale and face the fact that implementation of the policy will inevitably reduce political discussion instead of enhancing it.
The facts above lead me to believe that Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor, omitted the Fairness Doctrine from his platform for a reason. As Jesse Walker points out, there are many other levers the president and FCC can pull that influence public debate without inviting a constitutional challenge.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
The Left Embraces the Shock Doctrine
Last week Rahm Emanuel said to a prestigious audience, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.”
And that’s just the strategy that bestselling author Naomi Klein accuses right-wingers of employing. Weaving a convoluted yet superficially simple tale of world events, she claims in her book The Shock Doctrine that right-wing ideologues and governments both use and create moments of crisis to implement their nefarious agenda.
“Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters,” Klein writes. “Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas.” Which is exactly what American left-liberals have been doing in anticipation of a Democratic administration coming to power at a time when the public might be frightened into accepting more government than it normally would. The Center for American Progress, for instance, run by John Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and is now President-elect Obama’s transition director, has just released Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President.
The ideas in that report mesh well with the opportunities that Emanuel identified. After re-emphasizing the opportunities that crisis provides, he told his audience that the Obama administration wanted to use the opportunity to implement central planning of health care and energy, higher taxes, a federal program directed at “training the workforce,” and tighter control of financial institutions and capital flows.
But Emanuel isn’t the only one. As I mentioned previously, Paul Krugman has also endorsed the “don’t let a good crisis go to waste” power grab.
And now Arianna Huffington, the founder of the left-wing bulletin board HuffingtonPost, makes the same point in a public radio appearance. On KCRW’s “Left, Right, and Center,” November 21 (at about 27:20 in the podcast), she declared: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And it might be this particular crisis that will make it possible for the Obama administration to do some really innovative, bold things on health care, on energy independence, on all the areas that have been neglected.” (Hat tip: Thaddeus Russell.) Last year Huffington wrote a rave review of The Shock Doctrine, calling it “prophetic.” So it seems.
So . . . Emanuel. Krugman. Huffington. They’re all rallying around the theme that, well, that a left-liberal government should use this crisis to implement a more sweeping agenda than it could achieve in the absence of crisis. That’s the Shock Doctrine. Where are Naomi Klein and her legion of fans to expose and denounce it?
Of course, Klein might well decry their corporatist, big government/big business plans as just another example of Friedmanite/neoconservative/Pinochetist right-wing ideology. Anything other than local worker’s collectives smells like capitalism to her. So she can add the Obama administration to Milton Friedman, laissez-faire, the Bush administration, the Iraqi government, the Pinochet government, the Chinese Communist Party, and the ANC government of South Africa on the list of things that seem so many peas in a pod to her.
The San Francisco Chronicle says that Klein “may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.” The reviewer may have been more right than he knew.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Should We Fear Sea-Smurfs?
On October 1, active duty US Army troops for the first time began an assignment under control of Northern Command, the Combatant Command created in 2002 for homeland defense. This deployment, and particularly the revelation that the troops were training for law enforcement missions like crowd control, caused an outbreak of consternation on liberal and libertarian blogs. There is great uncertainty about why the Pentagon assigned active duty troops for homeland security and what purpose they serve. The main fear is that the mission will contravene Posse Comitatus, the 19th century law that restricts the use of the military domestically. The ACLU even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to compel the release of plans for the troops’ use. This post is an effort both to answer some of these questions and to raise others.
Here’s the bottom line: The trouble is less this particular assignment, which probably does not upend Posse Comitatus, than the gradual militarization of various governmental tasks in the United States. The creation of the Sea Smurfs is just the latest step in that process.
The troops are the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry division. In this year-long assignment they will be a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced Sea-Smurf). CBRNE stands for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive. The 1st BCT is the first of three CCMRF teams, who will comprise 15,000 soldiers in total. The other two will come from the Army National Guard. The Pentagon assigned these troops to Northern Command — probably over the objections of the Army, which likes to train its troops for war — because there was concern in Congress and elsewhere that Northcom could not ensure a proficient response to large scale disasters unless it controlled forces. For an example of this thinking, see this GAO report from April.
The assignment essentially amounts to extra training and equipment for responding to unconventional weapons attacks. The training will occur at Fort Stewart in Georgia where the troops are based. It does not change rotation schedules to Iraq of Afghanistan.
Why is this not an obvious violation of Posse Comitatus? Because it is shot full of holes already. It is a statute, and other statutes create exceptions. Today, the military can provide equipment and expertise to police, fly fighter aircraft to protect airspace, respond to storms and do a host of other things in the United States. What Posse Comitatus now prevents the military from doing is law enforcement: arrests, crowd-control, detention, search and seizure activities, and so on. That does not apply to the National Guard when they are under state command. And of course, there is an insurrection exception to Posse Comitatus. If the President declares an insurrection, troops can engage in law enforcement.
The 2006 Defense Authorization bill appeared to create new exceptions to Posse Comitatus. Those exceptions were undone, the status quo restored, via legislation passed by Senator Pat Leahy in early 2008. However, the administration’s theory of executive power says that they can use the troops as they see fit to deal with terrorism, whatever the law. There is probably a secret Office of Legal Counsel memo from 2001 that asserts that Posse Comitatus does not apply in the event of terrorist attacks. (That memo should be near the top of pyre when Obama takes office.)
Sea-smurfs can then do tasks short of law enforcement, including cleaning up after attacks. If terrorist attacks qualify as an insurrection, troops could perform law enforcement tasks in their aftermath. That might explain why the Sea-Smurfs received law enforcement training, but the Army denies that the training was related to domestic duties. It is good that the ACLU is trying to figure what exactly is intended.
Even if this mission is legal, however, it does not make it wise. Homeland defense activities like storms and terrorist attacks are the job of local and state authorities, and in extreme cases, the National Guard. Historically, these forces have been sufficient. Failures like Hurricane Katrina resulted more from poor decision making than the lack of capacity.
It’s true that a biological or nuclear attack is another can of worms. (One reason to avoid man-power intensive occupational wars is that they prevent the National Guard from performing homeland missions.) It is also true that regular Army troops have more capacity. But the standard cannot be perfect preparation for all contingencies, especially when they are extremely low-probability events.
The real trouble with the Sea-Smurfs is the logic that justifies Northern Command: that Americans face a host of dangers at home that only military forces can protect them against. These dangers are grossly exaggerated, but even if they aren’t, someone beyond bloggers ought to be asking why it is the job of the military, let alone the federal government, to interdict drugs and refugees, clean up after storms, protect computers and hunt bad actors at home. Doesn’t this sap the military’s readiness for war? And doesn’t this militarization of government have some detrimental effect on liberal values?
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Get Yourself a Crate of Scalpels
On Marketplace Radio Will Wilkinson offers some advice to the president-elect:
Congratulations, Barack Obama! You’re the next President of the United States. Sadly, the government’s so broke that even new curtains for the Oval Office are beyond the bounds of fiscal responsibility. Thanks to the war, the Wall Street bailout, the lousy economy, and the drop in tax revenue, your big campaign plans just got a lot smaller.
Here’s my advice: First, you’ve got to get spending under control. Yes: Bring the troops home, and shrink the military. But there’s enormous waste in the non-defense budget, too, and you need to go after it. You said we need to cut spending with a scalpel, not a hatchet. Well, if you don’t want to leave your kids with a crushing tax burden, you better get yourself a crate of scalpels.
Second, drop the xenophobic claptrap. The stuff from the debates about “mortgaging our future” by “borrowing from the Chinese to pay the Saudis” has got to stop. We are not, and cannot be, a self-contained fortress city. It’s good that capital markets are international. It’s good that energy markets are international. It’s good for prosperity and it’s good for peace that we’re all in it together. Help save America’s economy by making it even more open to the goods and people of the world.
Third, get real on the “new energy economy.” You’ve been claiming that the government can simultaneously create millions of new jobs, spur growth-enhancing innovation, and save the Earth by politically picking winners among energy companies. It’s a beautiful dream. But in reality, it means nothing more than the greening of corporate welfare and an increase in energy prices. Our struggling economy can’t afford that.
You’ve got Congress on your side and the wind of public opinion at your back — which is exactly why you should take it slow. This election was exactly what you said it was: a referendum on the last eight years of George W. Bush and his coalition. The voters agreed it was time to throw the bums out. But if you overreach, you’ll be tomorrow’s bum. Remember how popular Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America was? Yeah. Me neither.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics
“You Must Fulfill Your Moral Obligation to Public Radio.”
That’s what a public radio personality told me this morning. And he didn’t mean that you have a moral obligation to press Congress to defund public radio, so that you can reclaim your money and your dignity. No, this public radio personality admonishes that if you listen to public radio, you have a moral obligation to give even more than that.
Just the latest outrage from a public-radio membership campaign.
McCain Unleashes His Inner Goldwater
Dropping in the polls and running out of time, John McCain has finally gone on the offensive against Barack Obama on core Republican values that appeal to libertarians, conservatives, and Reagan Democrats. In his Saturday radio address he seized on Joe the Plumber’s question to candidate Obama:
My opponent’s answer showed that economic recovery isn’t even his top priority. His goal, as Senator Obama put it, is to “spread the wealth around.”
You see, he believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism. And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines. In the best case, “spreading the wealth around” is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn’t sound like a “new kind of politics.”
This would also explain some big problems with my opponent’s claim that he will cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans. You might ask: How do you cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, when more than 40 percent pay no income taxes right now? How do you reduce the number zero?
Well, that’s the key to Barack Obama’s whole plan: Since you can’t reduce taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit. And the Treasury will cover those checks by taxing other people, including a lot of folks just like Joe.
In other words, Barack Obama’s tax plan would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington. I suppose when you’ve voted against lowering taxes 94 times, as Senator Obama has done, a new definition of the term “tax credit” comes in handy.
At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives. They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Senator Obama. Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut it’s just another government giveaway.
That just might remind lots of voters why they don’t like to elect Democrats. Of course, it might work better if the Republicans hadn’t raised spending more than a trillion dollars. And if the current Republican administration hadn’t just nationalized the banks. And if McCain himself didn’t have a health care “tax credit” that also means that “the government will write them all checks.”
Media Bias – Proven!
The other day, my colleague Michael Cannon published a fun little Briefing Paper entitled “Does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine?” In it, he gives the provocative label, “socialized medicine,” a sensible meaning and examines where some important people stand on it. Worth a read.
There were a couple of lines in it that I thought were particularly interesting:
In April 2008, the Urban Institute held a public forum titled “What Is Socialized Medicine and Is It Relevant to Health Care Reform?” where scholars dismissed claims that Obama’s and similar plans would move America toward socialized medicine. The New York Times, the Associated Press, and National Public Radio have all run ostensibly objective stories with the same purpose. Of those organizations, only the Associated Press bothered to solicit input from anyone who thinks such claims are valid.
Awwwwwwwww. Did Michael not get a call from reporters when we thought he was supposed to? Pooor baaaaby! And welcome to the club, bud!
But today I spent some more time reviewing Mr. Cannon’s work: to wit, this blog post about Paul Krugman. His post links to this NPR story on the debate. I’m not all that big on reading, so I skipped down to the audio highlights and listened to a segment from each of six speakers chosen by NPR. And do you know what I heard?
Twenty-nine seconds from one advocate of socialized medicine. Forty-one seconds of a second advocate of socialized medicine. And twenty-four seconds from a third.
Not very much, you say? That’s our hyper-kinetic, media-saturated world. But get this:
The other side’s three advocates – Cannon among them – got fourteen seconds, twenty-one seconds, and fourteen seconds respectively.
The longest clip given to advocates of freedom is shorter than the shortest clip given to advocates of socialized medicine, and the total time given to socializers is just shy of double the time given to keepers of the flame of liberty.
Media bias! Proven! At least – according to the weakest possible standards of proof. …But still, ya gotta wonder.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Is Barack Obama’s Health Plan a Prescription for Socialized Medicine?
Barack Obama’s health plan would enroll more than 50 million Americans in new and existing government health programs, effectively doubling the Medicare rolls. It would increase taxes on nearly all workers. It would give the federal government near-total control over health insurance, by letting Washington control prices and dictate the content of every private health plan in the country. It would create a new government agency whose research would help government and private insurers ration medical care. Harvard University and Harris Interactive recently polled Americans who claim to know what socialized medicine is, and found:
- 79 percent believe that universal coverage equals socialized medicine,
- 73 percent said that socialized medicine exists when “the government pays most of the cost of health care,”
- 60 percent consider Medicare to be socialized medicine, and
- 57 percent believe Obama supports socialized medicine.
Obama has repeatedly voiced his support for a single-payer health care system – the type of plan most people have in mind when they use the term socialized medicine. Many who support Obama’s health plan, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, do so because they believe the Obama plan would lead to socialized, single-payer system.
So is Obama’s plan a prescription for socialized medicine?
Somehow, respectable folks at the Urban Institute, The New York Times, The Washington Post, FactChecker.org, and National Public Radio still say no. Their reasons boil down to these: Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
The Revival of Small-Government Conservatism?
For nearly eight years, Republicans either looked the other way (or greedily joined in) as the Bush administration increased the size, cost, and intrusiveness of government. The largest increase in domestic discretionary spending since the Great Society, a massive new entitlement program, greater federal control over education — big-government conservatism was on the march with barely a squeak of protest.
But in proposing a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, the Bush administration may finally have found the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is years overdue, but congressional Republicans are finally learning to say “no.” And its not just the usual advocates of limited government like Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) who are outraged by the biggest government intervention in our economy since FDR. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who acquiesced to — even twisted arms to push through — every big-government proposal that the Bush administration wanted, has suddenly found a spine. Even such go-along, get-along Republicans as Sens. Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jim Bunning (R-TN) have not been able to swallow this one. To hear Sen. Bunning describe the administration’s proposal as “socialism” is, well, amazing.
Meanwhile, grass-roots activists and talk radio are in open rebellion. People are actually suggesting that government isn’t the solution, government is the problem. How long has it been since we’ve heard that around this town?
The Bush administration will probably succeed in pushing through their proposal. But if the bailout succeeds in finally reigniting the fires of small-government conservatism, it may be worth the price.
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