In Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, when Chancellor Palpatine transforms the republic into an empire, Senator Amidala remarks:

So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

But it can also happen in silent acquiescence. For decades now, successive Congresses have evaded their responsibility to make decisions about the deployment of U.S. armed forces abroad. I write about the latest instance of this, in Libya, in today’s Britannica column:

Presidents have an obligation to obey the Constitution and the law. But one of the ways that separation of powers works is that each branch of government is supposed to jealously guard its prerogatives from usurpation by the other branches. Too often Congress ducks that responsibility, preferring to let presidents make decisions, make law, and make war without the involvement of Congress. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., explained in his book The Imperial Presidency, the expansion of presidential war-making power has been “as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation.”

The president is derelict in his duty to obey the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. And Congress is derelict in its duty to assert its constitutional authority. And I’m still wondering what’s happened to the antiwar movement, which ought to be loudly protesting not just the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the newborn war in Libya.

As George Will said last week, “even if you think the War Powers Resolution is an unwise law—it is a law.” And a former law professor who is now the president of the United States should obey the law. Will expanded on that point in his Sunday column, titled “Obama’s Illegal War,” in the old-fashioned print edition of the Washington Post.

Full Britannica column here.

Presidents Should Obey the Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will makes a good point in his latest column: Democrats maintain a peculiar “conviction that whatever government programs exist should forever exist because they always have existed.” Will’s observation centers around the shameless Democratic attacks on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposal to reform Medicare and Medicaid.

According to Will, “Ryan’s plan would alter Medicare. But Medicare has existed in its current configuration for only 46 of the nation’s 235 years.” Actually, “current configuration” isn’t quite accurate. For example, Medicare’s prescription drug component added by Republicans, which Ryan voted for, went into effect only five years ago.

Regardless, I agree with Will that so-called “progressives” have a “constricted notion of the possibilities of progress”:

The hysteria and hyperbole about Ryan’s plan arise, in part, from a poverty of today’s liberal imagination, an inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century. It is odd that “progressives,” as liberals now wish to be called, have such a constricted notion of the possibilities of progress.

Yes, Ryan’s plan displays “imagination” and I would add that it took political guts to suggest the reforms knowing that the left would nail him to the cross. However, let’s not forget that Ryan’s plan would also further cement these twin pillars of the federal welfare state. For all the silly accusations that Ryan is proposing to “privatize” Medicare, his plan repeatedly states that his aim is to “save” it:

Letting government break its promises to current seniors and to future generations is unacceptable. The reforms outlined in this budget protect and preserve Medicare for those in and near retirement, while saving and strengthening this critical program so that future generations can count on it to be there when they retire.

I wasn’t born yesterday, so I understand Ryan’s assurance to “those in and near retirement” that Medicare as they know it won’t be touched. However, I can’t square Ryan’s reference at the outset of his plan to the “timeless principles of American government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution – liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law” with his intention to strengthen “this critical program so that future generations can count on it be there when they retire.”

Now that Ryan’s plan has taken its inevitable beating from demagoguing Democrats, the GOP appears to be upping the “save Medicare for future generations” rhetoric.

Here’s tea party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as reported by Politico:

‘I understand the benefits that Medicare brings to America. It should be a part of our country,’ Rubio added. ‘I want Medicare to exist in a way that is unchanged for people that are in Medicare now. I want Medicare to exist when I retire. I want Medicare to exist when my children retire. And I don’t want Medicare to bankrupt itself for our country. And Medicare, as it’s currently structured, will go bankrupt.’

If that’s what Rubio, Ryan, and the rest of the congressional Republicans desire, then thank you for being honest. But please stop wrapping the intention to maintain for eternity a gigantic federal welfare state in the mantle of individual liberty, limited government, and the Constitution.

Support for the Eternal Federal Welfare State Is Bipartisan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama’s incomprehensible “kinetic military action” in Libya has driven George Will to distraction, and to mordant wit:

At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A?

Not to mention literary allusion:

Perhaps the CIA operatives should have stayed home and talked to some senators who seem to know what’s what. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) refers to the Libyan rebels as part of a “pro-democracy movement.” Perhaps they are. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must think so. Serving, as usual, as Sancho Panza to Sen. John McCain’s Don Quixote, Graham said last Sunday (on “Face the Nation”), “We should be taking the fight to Tripoli.”

Read the whole thing.

George Will on Libya is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will, whose speech at the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty Dinner can be heard here, writes today about Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky:

Democrats and, not amazingly, many commentators say Republicans are the ones with the worries because they are nominating strange and extreme candidates. Their Exhibit A is Rand Paul, winner of Kentucky’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.

Well. It may seem strange for a Republican to have opposed, as Paul did, the invasion of Iraq. But in the eighth year of that war, many Kentuckians may think he was strangely prescient. To some it may seem extreme to say, as Paul does, that although the invasion of Afghanistan was proper, our current mission there is “murky.” But many Kentuckians may think this is an extreme understatement.

These critical commentators range from David Frum and Commentary to the Huffington Post — the entire spectrum of the welfare-warfare state. But as Will says, Paul’s opposition to the Iraq war is shared by 60 percent of Americans. And plenty of mud was thrown at Paul by his Republican opponents, and Republican voters had this reply:

(H/T: DailyPaul.com)

Will also notes the surprising support for Rep. Ron Paul’s book End the Fed from Arlo Guthrie, whose anti-bailout song “I’m Changing My Name to Fannie Mae, was celebrated here.

George Will on Rand Paul is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Supreme Court is expected to decide tomorrow whether to summarily overturn a Ninth Circuit Court ruling, hear an appeal of that ruling, or let the Ninth Circuit’s decision stand. The case involves Arizona’s k-12 scholarship tax credit program that helps families afford private schooling, which the Ninth Circuit found last year to violate the First Amendment.

Before the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision, I predicted that it would rule against the tax credit program, and that it would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court. The first part of that prediction came to pass, and I still expect the second part to as well. For the reasons why SCOTUS will overturn the Ninth Circuit, see Cato’s brief in the case. 

Ilya Shapiro (with whom I co-wrote that brief) draws attention today to a great column by George Will in which Will likens the Ninth Circuit to a “stimulus package” for the Supreme Court. It’s a funny analogy, but it’s too benign. It’s more accurate to see the Ninth Circuit as a Denial of Service Attack on American justice. A D.O.S. is a computer attack that prevents Internet surfers from accessing a particular website/server by flooding it with spurious requests. By failing to take Supreme Court precedents seriously, as the Ninth Circuit routinely does, it creates a torrent of ridiculous rulings that demand the Supreme Court’s attention, thereby preventing the nation’s highest court from taking other important cases.

If there is a way for SCOTUS to reprimand the Ninth Circuit for spuriously consuming the nation’s most important legal resources, it would be in the interest of justice for it to do so.

The Ninth Circuit as a Denial of Service Attack on American Justice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Friend-of-Cato and 2010 Milton Friedman Prize Dinner keynote speaker George Will published an excellent column today about a case under review at the Supreme Court, Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn:

The case concerns an Arizona school choice program that has been serving low- and middle-income families for 13 years. The state grants a tax credit to individuals who donate to nonprofit entities that award scholarships for children to attend private schools — including religious schools. Yes, here we go again.

The question — if a question that has been redundantly answered remains a real question — is whether this violates the First Amendment proscription of any measure amounting to government “establishment of religion.” The incorrigible 9th Circuit has declared Arizona’s program unconstitutional, even though there is no government involvement in any parent’s decision to use a scholarship at a religious school.

If this case hadn’t originated in a state within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, nobody would have heard about it because any other federal appellate court would probably have decided it correctly. Will correctly and convincingly argues for summary reversal — as our friends at the Institute for Justice, who represent the petitioners, request — because the Ninth Circuit’s decision ignores clear Supreme Court precedent allowing parents to choose how to direct state funds for their children’s education (to a sectarian school or otherwise):

So, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist wrote [in 2002], public money “reaches religious schools only as a result of the genuine and independent choices of private individuals.” Therefore any “advancement of a religious mission” is merely “incidental” and confers “no imprimatur of state approval . . . on any particular religion, or on religion generally.” These standards had been developed in various prior cases.  

Cato filed a brief in this case that I previously blogged about.  And you can listen to Will’s Friedman Dinner address here.  (Unrelatedly, if you still haven’t read his masterful Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball – which has sold many more copies than any of his political books — pick up the re-issued twentieth anniversary edition.)

Supreme Court Should Call Out Ninth Circuit in Education Case is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The latest catch phrase in the immigration debate is that we must “get control of our borders” before we consider actually changing the current immigration law that has made enforcement so difficult in the first place.

In his Washington Post column yesterday, George Will wrote that “the government’s refusal to control [the U.S.-Mexican] border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Democrats in Congress this week unveiled the outlines of an immigration bill that would postpone any broader reforms, such as a new worker visa program or legalization of workers already here, until a series of border security “benchmarks” have been met.

Requiring successful enforcement of the current immigration laws before they can be changed is a non sequitur. It’s like saying, in 1932, that we can’t repeal the nationwide prohibition on alcohol consumption until we’ve drastically reduced the number of moonshine stills and bootleggers. But Prohibition itself created the conditions for the rise of those underground enterprises, and the repeal of Prohibition was necessary before the government could “get control” of its unintended consequences.

Illegal immigration is the Prohibition debate of our day. By essentially barring the legal entry of low-skilled immigrant workers, our own government has created the conditions for an underground labor market, complete with smuggling and day-labor operations. As long as the government maintains this prohibition, illegal immigration will be widespread, and the cost of reducing it, in tax dollars and compromised civil liberties, will be enormous.

We know from experience that expanding opportunities for legal immigration can dramatically reduce incentives for illegal immigration. In the 1950s, the federal government faced widespread illegal immigration across the Mexican border. In response, the government simultaneously beefed up enforcement while greatly expanding the number of workers allowed in the country through the Bracero guest-worker program. The result: Apprehensions at the border dropped by 95 percent. (For documentation, see this excellent 2003 paper by Stuart Anderson, a Cato adjunct scholar and executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy.)

If we want to “get control” of our border with Mexico, the smartest thing we could do would be to allow more workers to enter the United States legally under the umbrella of comprehensive immigration reform. Then we could focus our enforcement resources on a much smaller number of people who for whatever reason are still operating outside the law.

To ‘Control the Border,’ First Reform Immigration Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will offers conservatives a useful reminder about “judicial activism” and what the Supreme Court ought to be doing:

Conservatives spoiling for a fight should watch their language. The recent decision most dismaying to them was Kelo (2005), wherein the court upheld the constitutionality of a city government using its eminent domain power to seize property for the spurious “public use” of transferring it to wealthier interests who will pay higher taxes to the seizing government. Conservatives wish the court had been less deferential to elected local governments. (Stevens later expressed regret for his part in the Kelo ruling.)

The recent decision most pleasing to conservatives was this year’s Citizens United, wherein the court overturned part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The four liberal justices deplored the conservatives’ refusal to defer to Congress’s expertise in regulating political speech.

So conservatives should rethink their rhetoric about “judicial activism.” The proper question is: Will the nominee be actively enough engaged in protecting liberty from depredations perpetrated by popular sovereignty?

George Will on Judicial Activism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will’s latest column takes a look a drug policy and the views of the new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski.  Notably, Will mentions Portugal’s experience with decriminalization of all drugs since 2001 and says Kerlikowski is aware of the Portuguese policy as well.  Cato published a report on Portugal’s drug policy in April and the author, Glenn Greenwald, discussed his findings at a Cato policy forum here.  George Will’s shifting views on drug policy (toward liberalization) reflect the shifting views of other conservative pundits and the public more generally.

Will appeared on ABC on Sunday, and discussed his views on drug policy. Watch:

For more Cato work on drug policy, go here, here, and here.

George Will and Drug Decriminalization is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the latest example of “We had to burn the village to save it” logic, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) argues in a letter in the Washington Post this morning that the way to “support more trade” in the future is to raise barriers to trade today.

Brown criticizes Post columnist George Will for criticizing President Obama for imposing new tariffs on imported tires from China. Like President Obama himself, Brown claims that by invoking the Section 421 safeguard, the president was merely “enforcing” the trade laws that China agreed to but has failed to follow. He scolds advocates of trade for talking about the “rule of law” but failing to enforce it when it comes to trade agreements. Brown concludes, “If America is ever to support more trade, its people need to know that the rules will be enforced. And Mr. Obama did exactly that.”

Nothing in U.S. trade law required President Obama to impose tariffs on imported Chinese tires. As my colleague Dan Ikenson explained in a recent Free Trade Bulletin, Section 421 allows private parties to petition the U.S. government for protection if rising imports from China have caused or just threaten to cause “market disruption” to domestic producers. If the U.S. International Trade Commission recommends tariff relief, the president can decide to impose tariffs, or not.

The law allows the president to refrain from imposing tariffs if he finds they are “not in the national economic interest of the United States or … would cause serious harm to the national security of the United States.”

As I argue at length in my new Cato book Mad about Trade, trade barriers invariably damage our national economic interests and weaken our national security, and the tire tariffs are no exception. If the president had followed the letter and spirit of the law, he would have rejected the tariff.

And since when is causing “market disruption” something to be punished by law? Isn’t that what capitalism and market competition are all about? New competitors and new products are constantly disrupting markets, to the discomfort of entrenched producers but to the great benefit of the general public and the economy as a whole.

Human beings once widely practiced an economic system that minimized market disruption. It was called feudalism.

C/P Mad About Trade

Curbing Free Trade to Save It is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Would you buy a state-building mission from this man?

Today David Brooks (in the role of Teddy Roosevelt) debates George Will (as Edmund Burke) on the subject of Afghanistan without citing him.  This debate marks a high point of conservative politics where neoconservative ideology appears in concrete clarity.

First, Brooks makes clear that he is not interested in merely managing the problem of terrorism, but rather in “prevailing” in the war in Afghanistan.  He argues that “only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success,” but then proceeds to absurdly define population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine as one in which “small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.”

Either Brooks is being cute here or demonstrating his ignorance.  With one word — “small” — Brooks has utterly mischaracterized what counterinsurgency is all about.

Population-centric counterinsurgency is all about large numbers of American men and women, not small numbers.  The promoters of COIN in Afghanistan have recently taken to including the Afghan National Army in the count of counterinsurgents, but the textbook — and as a result, obviously oversimplified — number of counterinsurgents you’d want in a place with a population, dysfunctional national government, and geography like Afghanistan pushes well up to around half a million.  It is an extraordinarily resource- and labor-intensive endeavor.  If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll take David Petraeus or David Kilcullen as authorities on the matter.

Brooks pushes his argument further, declaring that we possess only two choices in Afghanistan: “surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.”  One paragraph later, Brooks writes of the fight against terrorism that “we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve.”  That Brooks does not recognize the conflict between these views is telling.  See Rory Stewart for more on the swashbuckling certainty like what Brooks is displaying.

Then Brooks borrows from Stephen Biddle the claim that we must conduct a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan not because of the war on terrorism in that country per se, but rather because:

A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.

This is really cranking it up to 11 on the hyperbole meter.  We may recall that in the 1990s when the Taliban was running Afghanistan, Pakistan was arguably more stable than it is today.

In closing, Brooks wheels out a straw man:

When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view. Read Clare Lockhart’s Sept. 17 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get a sense of the way many knowledgeable people view the situation.

It is curious to hear David Brooks refer to a large number of people who agree with him on policy as “people who know little about Afghanistan.”  Like Gen. Petraeus.  Seth Jones.  Anthony Cordesman.  I could go on.

Brooks then undermines his case that the Taliban would certainly be able to set up a national government if we left by admitting that “the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor.”  Even for thugs like the Taliban, having a 6 percent approval rating, men like Rashid Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar running around your country, and the United States poking its nose in regularly looks a lot darker than Brooks makes it out.

There’s more in the piece, but combined with Will’s piece, it’s a peek through the keyhole where you can see the warring tribes within conservatism thrashing it out.

Update: I was also interested to see the argument Brooks made on behalf of a study I had not read by political scientists Andrew Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli. But Stephen Walt observes that on this score too Brooks is misinforming his readers.

David Brooks Is Confused about Counterinsurgency is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Anyone still inclined to minimize the meaning of President Obama’s Chinese tire tariff decision should read George Will’s column today.

It is not only the direct costs of this particular decision, which are numerous and tallied in the article (and in this paper), that should concern us. Will’s bigger concern is the foreshadowing of more protectionism from a president who has proven to have no qualms about looking straight into other people’s eyes and claiming that his administration opposes protectionism, favors free trade, and is working to advance pending trade agreements through Congress, all while remaining “invertebrate as he invariably is when organized labor barks.”

Is this a sign of schizophrenia? No, it’s worse. What we have here is a president who views trade policy as nothing more than a tool to advance his own political standing with groups that are hostile to commerce. Since groups on the left have grown disenchanted that some of the most socialist elements of the health care debate might be left on the cutting room floor, why not try to placate them with anti-business, anti-consumer, anti-globalization protectionism? Will makes the link between tire tariffs and the health care debate in his concluding sentence.

A president who fancies himself economically enlightened and internationalist would treat trade policy as a means to promoting economic growth and sound foreign relations. This president, regrettably, views trade policy as a sacrificial pawn in the service of politics as usual.

The Tire Tariff and the Invertebrate President: A Fable is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yaroslav Trofimov’s article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal explains how Ghulam Yahya, a former anti-Taliban, Tajik miltia leader from Herat, became an insurgent. The short answer: because the American master plan in Afghanistan required the retirement of warlords. The trouble is that in much of Afghanistan “warlord” is a synonym for “local government.” Attacking local authority structures is a good way to make enemies.  So it went in Herat. Having been fired from a government post, Ghulum Yahya turned his militia against Kabul and now fires rockets at foreign troops, kidnaps their contractors, and brags of welcoming foreign jihadists.  Herat turned redder on the color-coded maps of the “Taliban” insurgency.

That story reminded me of C.J. Chivers’s close-in accounts of firefights he witnessed last spring with an army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley. According to Chivers, the Taliban there revolted in part because the Afghan government shut down their timber business. That is an odd reason for us to fight them.

One of the perversions of the branch of technocratic idealism that we now call counterinsurgency doctrine is its hostility to local authority structures.  As articulated on TV by people like General Stanley McChrystal, counterinsurgency is a kind of one-size-fits-all endeavor. You chase off the insurgents, protect the people, and thus provide room for the central government and its foreign backers to provide services, which win the people to the government. The people then turn against the insurgency.  This makes sense, I suppose, for relatively strong central states facing insurgencies, like India, the Philippines or Colombia.  

But where the central state is dysfunctional and essentially foreign to the region being pacified, this model may not fit. Certainly it does not describe the tactic of buying off Sunni sheiks in Anbar province Iraq (a move pioneered by Saddam Hussein, not David Petraeus, by the way). It is even less applicable to the amalgam of fiefdoms labeled on our maps as Afghanistan. From what I can tell, power in much of Afghanistan is really held by headmen — warlords — who control enough men with guns to collect some protection taxes and run the local show. The western idea of government says the central state should replace these mini-states, but that only makes sense as a war strategy if their aims are contrary to ours, which is only the case if they are trying to overthrow the central government or hosting terrorists that go abroad to attack Americans. Few warlords meet those criteria. The way to “pacify” the other areas is to leave them alone. Doing otherwise stirs up needless trouble; it makes us more the revolutionary than the counter-revolutionary.

On a related note, I see John Nagl attacking George Will for not getting counterinsurgency doctrine. Insofar as Will seems to understand, unlike Nagl, that counterinsurgency doctrine is a set of best practices that allow more competent execution of foolish endeavors, this is unsurprising. More interesting is Nagl’s statement that we, the United States have not “properly resourced” the Afghan forces.  Nagl does not mention that the United States is already committed to building the Afghan security forces (which are, incidentally, not ours) to a size — roughly 450,000 — that will annually cost about 500% of Afghanistan’s budget (Rory’s Stewart’s calculation), which is another way of saying we will be paying for these forces for the foreseeable future.

It probably goes too far to say this war has become a self-licking ice-cream cone where we create both the enemy and the forces to fight them, but it’s a possibility worth considering.

Making Enemies in Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Obsidian Wings echoes my frustrations about the debate surrounding the war in Afghanistan. Publius notes, “The goal of preventing Taliban control isn’t a sufficient reason to stay.”

That analysis is absolutely right. As I mention in my forthcoming white paper (co-authored with TGC), Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan, the resurrection of the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime doesn’t threaten America’s sovereignty or physical security. The Taliban is a guerilla-jihadi Pashtun-dominated movement with no international agenda or shadowy global mission. Even if their parochial fighters took over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory it is not compelling enough of a rationale to maintain an indefinite, large-scale military presence in the region, especially since our presence feeds the Pashtun insurgency we seek to defeat (as Publius also acknowledges) and our policies are pushing the conflict over the border into nuclear-armed Pakistan, further destabilizing its already shaky government.

Even if the Taliban were to reassert themselves amid a scaled down U.S. presence, it is not clear that the Taliban would again host al Qaeda. In The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright, staff writer for New Yorker magazine, found that before 9/11 the Taliban was divided over whether to shelter Osama bin Laden. The terrorist financier wanted to attack Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which, according to Wright, would have defied a pledge Taliban leader Mullah Omar made to Prince Turki al-Faisal, chief of Saudi intelligence (1977–2001), to keep bin Laden under control. The Taliban’s reluctance to host al Qaeda’s leader means it is not a foregone conclusion that the same group would provide shelter to the same organization whose protection led to their overthrow.

Moreover, America’s claim that the Taliban is its enemy seems less than coherent. After all, although some U.S. officials issued toothless and perfunctory condemnations of the Taliban when it controlled most of Afghanistan from September 1996 through October 2001, during that time the United States never once made a substantive policy shift toward or against the Taliban despite knowing that it imposed a misogynistic, oppressive, and militant Islamic regime onto Afghans. For Washington to now pursue an uncompromising hostility toward the Taliban’s eye-for-an-eye brand of justice can be interpreted as an opportunistic attempt to cloak U.S. strategic ambitions in moralistic values.

On a side note, another conservative joins George Will for getting out of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan = Bottomless Pit of Massive Social Engineering is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Conservative columnist George Will wants out of the war in Afghanistan.  And his recommendation is getting some notice.  Reports Mike Allen in Politico:

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, is calling for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan in his latest column.

“[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes.

President Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.

Will’s prescription – in which he recalls Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 – seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

The columnist’s startling recommendation surfaced on the same day that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sent an assessment up his chain of command recommending what he called “a revised implementation strategy.” In a statement, McChrystal also called for “commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort.”

With a liberal Democrat having become president and made Afghanistan his war, and George Will leading the charge, might conservative Republicans rediscover their inner anti-war feelings?

George Will Says It’s Time to Leave Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tremendous column today by George Will giving President Obama and his education secretary exactly what they deserve for their DC choice skulduggery. This story is not going away!

Catch all of our coverage of the devious goings-on, by the way, right here.

George Will Lets ‘Em Have It! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

While Barack Obama’s economics team hammers out its $800 billion fiscal stimulus plan, the commentariat is battling over the effectiveness of what some consider the prototype stimulus package, the New Deal.* The suppressed (and problematic) conclusion to all this punditry seems to be: Because government spending under the New Deal helped/didn’t help to end the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus plan will/won’t help to end the current recession.

One of the opening salvos was this exchange between George Will (anti-New Deal) and Paul Krugman (pro). More recently, New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen (pro) wrote this column, responding to an op-ed by former Business Week bureau chief Andrew Wilson (anti) in the Wall Street Journal.

So who’s right? Did New Deal government spending “help,” as Cohen puts it?

To answer that, we first have to define Cohen’s term — what would it mean to say that government spending under the New Deal “helped”? Two possibilities come to mind:

• New Deal spending boosted consumption, thereby increasing production, reducing unemployment, and ending the Depression.
• New Deal spending aided people who would have otherwise been destitute during the Depression.

The first sense considers the New Deal as a stimulus program to revive the economy; the second considers it as a welfare program to aid the poor. The two notions are far from equivalent. My reading of the literature suggests that the New Deal did little as an economic stimulus, but it did provide welfare benefits.

The figure below sketches U.S. GDP and government spending (all levels) for the Great Depression era. The wildly fluctuating GDP line clearly marks the Great Contraction of 1929-1932, the Recession within the Depression of 1937–1938, and the return of GDP to pre-crash levels in 1940. In contrast, government spending has only a very mild upward slope over the period (until the 1941 ramping-up for World War II). In 1930, the second year of Herbert Hoover’s administration, government spending totaled $10 billion; at the height of the New Deal spending boom in 1936, government spending reached $13.1 billion. (In comparison, that rate of government spending growth is just below the average for the entire post-WWII era.) This raises the question of whether there was much New Deal fiscal stimulus at all.

We get a somewhat different view if we consider the federal budget surplus/deficit. Much of the benefit of fiscal stimulus is supposed to come from the fact that it’s deficit spending. In essence, government borrowing moves future consumption to the present and hopefully boosts the economy to a permanently higher level. As the figure below shows, the federal government dramatically ramped up deficit spending in the last year of Hoover’s administration, as tax receipts sagged and Hoover enacted his own emergency programs. FDR continued the borrowing to fund components of the New Deal.

However, this borrowing was not dramatic by today’s standards. As a share of GDP, the New Deal deficit peaked at 5.4 percent of GDP ($3.6 billion) in 1934; in dollar terms, it peaked at $5.1 billion (4.3 percent of GDP) in 1936. In contrast, President-elect Obama recently announced that he expects ”trillion-dollar deficits for years to come,” even without the $800 billion stimulus package that his administration is preparing. With a U.S. GDP of roughly $13.8 trillion, the Obama-projected deficit (not counting the stimulus package) represents 7.2 percent of GDP.

Does the New Deal experience thus suggest that, when it comes to fiscal stimulus, just a little bit can have large effects? Interestingly, economic research suggests the opposite. Long before she was named chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer wrote a short paper for the Journal of Economic History titled “What Ended the Great Depression?” The paper provides empirical evidence that FDR’s fiscal policy provided little stimulus during the Great Depression. As shown in the figure below (reproduced from Romer’s article), the results of the New Deal’s fiscal stimulus (solid line) were little different from what she projects would have resulted from “normal fiscal policy” (dotted line). Both the deficit spending and the multiplier effect from that spending were too small to budge GDP.

What did end the Great Depression? Romer argues that another FDR policy — doubling the fixed exchange rate for the dollar relative to gold — did the trick, though the New Dealers seem to have lucked into that result rather than planned it. The rate change worked as a monetary stimulus, inducing large gold flows into the United States, where they could now buy twice as many dollars. That buttressed bank deposits and increased bank willingness to lend, encouraging investment. The lending resulted in a sharp increase in the money supply, pushing against the Depression’s price deflation and encouraging consumption. From the moment the exchange rate changed, the United States began to climb out of the Depression — albeit slowly; more slowly than many other countries.

Romer’s explanation dovetails with Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s work on the root cause of the Depression: the Federal Reserve’s sharp reduction of the money supply in the late 1920s, in order to moderate the stock market boom and return the United States to the pre-WWI dollar-gold exchange rate. It also dovetails with evidence that other nations’ recoveries from the Great Contraction began soon after they abandoned efforts to return their currencies to pre-war gold exchange rates. My reading of the economic literature indicates that the “monetary policy did it” thesis has been generally accepted by economic historians (contra Cohen’s graf 9).

So it was FDR’s monetary policy that ended the Great Depression, not such New Deal initiatives as the WPA, the CCC, NIRA, and the rest of the alphabet soup. This follows the findings of a later paper that Romer co-authored with husband David Romer on U.S. recessions in the post-WWII era, which found that monetary stimulus proved superior to discretionary fiscal stimulus in restoring the economy.

What, then, to make of our warring pundits? In the fight between Krugman and Will over the stimulatory effects of the New Deal, it seems that opposing sides can both be wrong. Will was incorrect to argue that economic conditions grew worse during the New Deal era — conditions did improve, albeit slowly, and were temporarily reversed by the Recession within the Depression. Krugman, on the other hand, was wrong to argue that FDR’s fiscal stimulus helped to remedy the Depression and that only the large fiscal stimulus of WWII ended the Depression — in fact, GDP had returned to pre-Crash trend (as calculated by Romer) by 1940. And both mischaracterize the 1937–1938 Recession in the Depression. Although federal deficit spending did decrease along with the economy, the recession appears to have been largely the product of onerous new banking regulations that weakened the monetary stimulus (a point that today’s eager-to-regulate Congress should bear in mind).

Concerning Wilson and Cohen, Wilson goes too far in claiming that FDR (and Hoover) “were jointly responsible for turning a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” If anyone merits that distinction, it is the Federal Reserve for its pre-Crash contractionary monetary policy. Cohen is wrong to claim that “as a matter of economics … F.D.R’s spending programs did help the economy.” However, he does have a point that the various New Deal jobs programs provided income for many people who would have otherwise been destitute. As indicated in the figure below, at their height, the programs provided “emergency jobs” to just over 40 percent of laborers who likely would have otherwise been jobless. As state unemployment insurance and federal safety net programs largely did not exist at the time of the Crash, the New Deal jobs programs were likely a godsend for those who got the jobs (though they did little for the millions more who didn’t). Today, however, several government programs provide income and other benefits to the jobless and the poor, so the welfare benefits of the New Deal do not need to be replicated.

Where does all of this leave us in evaluating policy responses to the current recession?

First, the economic history of the New Deal and the rest of the 20th century raises serious doubts about the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages in reversing an economic downturn. Monetary stimulus has a far better track record (which is not to say that we shouldn’t have concerns about such policy — but that is a discussion for another blog post). And though there is no longer a fixed gold exchange rate for the dollar and the Fed has dropped nominal short-term interest rates to near zero, the Fed has other monetary weapons that it can use to fight this recession. Second, the helpful welfare benefits of the New Deal are now carried out automatically by other government programs.

This leaves us with an important question that has so far gone unasked by the commentariat: Given the above, is $800 billion in new government deficit spending worthwhile?

* As Tyler Cowen points out, it’s wrong to think of the New Deal as a comprehensive, unified set of fiscal initiatives; FDR tried many different policies, and sometimes changed approaches, to fight the Depression.

Did the New Deal ‘Help’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog