My Cato colleague John Cochrane – who is way smarter than I am — has a generally excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal on ObamaCare’s contraception mandate:

Salting mandated health insurance with birth control is exactly the same as a tax—on employers, on Catholics, on gay men and women, on couples trying to have children and on the elderly—to subsidize one form of birth control…

The tax rate and spending debates that occupy the media are a small part of the effective taxes and spending that the government achieves by these regulatory mandates…

The natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other contentious practices are permitted. But those who object don’t have to pay for them. The federal takeover of medicine prevents us from reaching these natural compromises and needlessly divides our society…

Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.

My only quibble is with his claim, “Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses.”

That’s generally true. But medicine is an area where, potentially at least, small up-front expenditures (e.g., on hypertension control) could prevent large losses down the road. So it may be economically efficient for health plans to cover some small, regular, and predictable expenses. Both the carrier and the consumer would benefit. In fact, that would be the market’s way of telling otherwise uninformed consumers, “Hey! Controlling your hypertension is a really good for you!” And really, if someone is so risk-averse that they want health insurance with first-dollar coverage of everything – and they’re willing to pay the outrageous premiums that would accompany such coverage — why should we take issue with that?

ObamaCare’s contraceptive-coverage mandate demonstrates that government does  a horrible job of picking only those types of “preventive” services for which first-dollar coverage will leave consumers better off. But I also think advocates of free-market health care generally need to let go of the idea that health insurance exists only for catastrophic expenses.

Cochrane on ObamaCare’s Contraceptive-Coverage Mandate is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Regarding legislation to create an ObamaCare “Exchange” in Virginia, the Richmond Times-Dispatch explains:

Republicans at the General Assembly are falling prey to the fallacy of the false alternative…

[H]ere are the real options facing Virginia: (a) federal bureaucrats determine the form of our exchange, or (b) federal bureaucrats determine the form of our exchange. There is no (c)…

Running a health-insurance exchange would cost a lot of money — money Virginia does not have. Since Washington will dictate how it will be run, Washington should pick up the tab.

RTD: ‘Insurance Exchange: Just Say No’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politico‘s Jason Millman writes:

How much does Rick Santorum hate President Barack Obama’s health care law? So much that he even opposes the parts a lot of Republicans like.

The Republican presidential candidate, talking health care across the street from Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Monday morning, blasted parts of the Affordable Care Act that poll well even among Republican voters — like guaranteeing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and making health insurers cover preventive care.

Santorum, who has touted free market health principles like health savings accounts as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, defended insurance industry practices the law eliminates, like setting premiums based on people’s health status.

Sigh. I refer my right honorable friend to the smack-down I gave such silliness some time ago:

Asking people whether they support the law’s pre-existing conditions provisions is like asking whether they want sick people to pay less for medical care.  Of course they will say yes.  If anything, it’s amazing that as many as 36 percent of the public are so economically literate as to know that these government price controls will actually harm people with pre-existing conditions.  Also amazing is that among people with pre-existing conditions, equal numbers believe these provisions will be useless or harmful as think they will help.

But as the collapse of the CLASS Act and private markets for child-only health insurance have shown, and as the Obama administration has argued in federal court, the pre-existing conditions provisions cannot exist without the wildly unpopular individual mandate because on their own, the pre-existing conditions provisions would cause the entire health insurance market to implode.

If the pre-existing conditions provisions are a (supposed) benefit of the law, then the individual mandate is the cost of those provisions. If voters don’t like the individual mandate–if they aren’t willing to pay the cost of the law’s purported benefits–then the “popular” provisions aren’t popular, either.

Or, as Firedoglake’s Jon Walker puts it, ObamaCare is about as popular as pepperoni and broken glass pizza.

Even among Republican voters? Good grief.

But, But…Price Controls Poll Well! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Associated Press photojournalist Noah Berger captured this thousand-word image near the Occupy Oakland demonstrations last month.

(AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Many Cato@Liberty readers will get it immediately. They can stop reading now.

For everyone else, this image perfectly illustrates the ethos of what I call the Church of Universal Coverage.

Like everyone who supports a government guarantee of access to medical care, the genius who left this graffiti on Kaiser Permanente’s offices probably thought he was signaling how important other human beings are to him. He wants them to get health care after all. He was willing to expend resources to transmit that signal: a few dollars for a can of spray paint (assuming he didn’t steal it) plus his time. He probably even felt good about himself afterward.

Unfortunately, the money and time this genius spent vandalizing other people’s property are resources that could have gone toward, say, buying him health insurance. Or providing a flu shot to a senior citizen. This genius has also forced Kaiser Permanente to divert resources away from healing the sick. Kaiser now has to spend money on a pressure washer and whatever else one uses to remove graffiti from those surfaces (e.g., water, labor).

The broader Church of Universal Coverage spends resources campaigning for a government guarantee of access to medical care. Those resources likewise could have been used to purchase medical care for, say, the poor. The Church’s efforts impel opponents of such a guarantee to spend resources fighting it. For the most part, though, they encourage interest groups to expend resources to bend that guarantee toward their own selfish ends. The taxes required to effectuate that (warped) guarantee reduce economic productivity both among those whose taxes enable, and those who receive, the resulting government transfers.

In the end, that very government guarantee ends up leaving people with less purchasing power and undermining the market’s ability to discover cost-saving innovations that bring better health care within the reach of the needy. That’s to say nothing of the rights that the Church of Universal Coverage tramples along the way: yours, mine, Kaiser Permanente’s, the Catholic Church’s…

I see no moral distinction between the Church of Universal Coverage and this genius. Both spend time and money to undermine other people’s rights as well as their own stated goal of “health care for everybody.”

Of course, it is always possible that, as with their foot soldier in Oakland, the Church’s efforts are as much about making a statement and feeling better about themselves as anything else.

The Ethos of Universal Coverage is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The liberty-lovers at New Hampshire’s Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy have produced this video of my appearance before the New Hampshire House of Representatives where I argued against creating health insurance “Exchanges”:

(Notice my rapt audience.)

Should New Hampshire Create a Health Insurance Exchange? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In recent weeks, officials from two states have claimed that if they do not set up an ObamaCare health insurance “Exchange,” the state will lose federal Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program funds. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R), has since walked back that claim. New Hampshire Commissioner of Health and Human Services Nicholas Toumpas has not.

In a January 19 letter to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Toumpas writes:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) mandates that states create a virtual health coverage marketplace called an Exchange. To ensure compliance with this federal mandate the law provides that having an Exchange in place by January 1, 2014, is a condition precedent to receipt of Medicaid funding commencing in 2014.

I have not heard the Obama administration or any other ObamaCare supporter claim that the law contains such a mandate. I have made inquiries in a handful of states. None of them report that the Obama administration has said that failing to create an Exchange will result in the loss of Medicaid or SCHIP funds. If what Toumpas says is true, it will certainly come as a shock to the 35 states that have not enacted legislation to create an Exchange, including many states that have flat-out refused.

But is it true? Parts of ObamaCare might seem to support Toumpas’ claim.

• Section 1311 declares that each state “shall” set up an Exchange.
• The law also imposes conditions on the receipt of federal Medicaid and SCHIP funds, and those provisions do make reference to Exchanges. Section 2101 provides that, with regard to certain children who are not eligible for SCHIP, states receiving federal SCHIP funds “shall establish procedures to ensure that the children are enrolled in a qualified health plan that…is offered through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311.”
• Section 2201 provides that as a condition of receiving federal Medicaid funds, states “shall establish procedures for” several things, including “ensuring that individuals who apply for but are determined to be ineligible for [Medicaid and SCHIP] are screened for eligibility for enrollment in qualified health plans offered through such an Exchange.” The words “such an Exchange” refer to the words “an Exchange established by the State under section 1311,” which appear a few lines before.

Thus, sections 2101 and 2201 might seem to require states to establish an Exchange so that the required “procedures” can interface with it. But there are serious problems with that interpretation.

First, the directive that states “shall” create Exchanges does not amend that part of the U.S. code where Congress imposes conditions on Medicaid and SCHIP funds—i.e., the Social Security Act, or chapter 7 of title 42. It instead appears in chapter 157, which is also where Congress explains that the consequence for failing to create an Exchange is that the federal government will create one.

Second, sections 2101 and 2201 provide, respectively, that states “shall establish procedures to” enroll certain children through a state-run Exchange, and that states “shall establish procedures for” enabling the state’s Medicaid-eligibility system to coordinate with a state-run Exchange. One need not diagram those sentences to see that the object of “shall establish” is “procedures,” not “Exchange.”

Third, ObamaCare does create these “coordination” conditions within the Social Security Act. That fact demonstrates that ObamaCare’s authors knew how to make the directive to create an Exchange an explicit condition of receiving Medicaid and SCHIP funds, if that’s what they wanted to do.

Fourth, if ObamaCare’s authors had intended to condition Medicaid and SCHIP funds on the creation of Exchanges, or if that were a defensible interpretation of the law as written, then one might expect to have heard members of Congress discussing it. One might expect the Obama administration to have informed states of this condition as part of their effort to encourage states to implement the law. I have been paying fairly close attention to this issue. I have seen no evidence of either.

Fifth, the Supreme Court has held that “if Congress desires to condition the States’ receipt of federal funds, it must do so unambiguously, enabling the States to exercise their choice knowingly, cognizant of the consequences of their participation.” It is simply not credible to argue that ObamaCare unambiguously conditions Medicaid and SCHIP funds on the creation of an Exchange. The law never does so explicitly, and the language and structure of the law militate against the claim that it does so implicitly.

A more reasonable interpretation of these conditions is that states will be in compliance so long as they have the required procedures at the ready—regardless of whether those procedures are coordinating with a state-created Exchange, a federal Exchange, or no Exchange (in the event that neither level of government creates one).

I have no doubt that, had ObamaCare’s authors had any inkling that two thirds of states might balk at setting up an Exchange, they would have made it a condition of Medicaid and SCHIP participation. But they didn’t foresee the widespread resistance ObamaCare would encounter. When drafting ObamaCare and for some time afterward, they honestly thought, “The more people learn about this bill, the more they [will] like it.” Thus they didn’t create that requirement.

If Toumpas is the only state or federal official who sees this mandate in the law, that’s probably because it isn’t there. Just as important, there is no evidence that the Obama administration sees or is enforcing such a requirement. If Toumpas has such evidence, he should furnish it.

Until then, New Hampshire and the other 49 states can be confident that refusing to create an Exchange will not cost them Medicaid or SCHIP funds.

Will States Lose Medicaid Funds If They Fail to Create an ObamaCare ‘Exchange’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…is that it overshadowed news that the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to repeal one of two new entitlement programs created by Obamacare—the ironically named CLASS Act—with a bipartisan three-fifths majority. (With numbers like that, Congress could even repeal Obamacare’s death panel!)

But really, one private organization pulling funding for another private organization is way more important than Congress voting to repeal an entitlement program … isn’t it?

The Real Tragedy of the Komen/Planned Parenthood Flapdoodle is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’m sure that many of you are following the controversy over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s decision to suspend its partnership with and funding of Planned Parenthood. Two thoughts on this:

First, this controversy provides a delightful contrast to the Obama administration’s decision to force all Americans to purchase contraceptives and subsidize abortions.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation chose to stop providing grants to Planned Parenthood. Lots of people didn’t like (and/or don’t believe) Komen’s reasons. Some declared they would stop giving to Komen. Others approved of Komen’s decision and started giving to Komen. Many declared they would start donating to Planned Parenthood to show their disapproval of Komen’s decision.

Notice what didn’t happen. Nobody forced anybody to do anything that violated their conscience. People who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission can now support Komen without any misgivings. People who like Planned Parenthood’s mission can still support it, and can support other organizations that fight breast cancer. The whole episode may end up being a boon for both sides, if total contributions to the two organizations are any measure. Such are the blessings of liberty.

Contrast that to Obamacare, which forces people who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission to support it.

Second, there seems to be a bottomless well of delusion from which supporters of Planned Parenthood draw the idea that this decision shows Komen has injected politics into its grant-making.

Assume for the sake of argument that the Susan G. Komen Foundation has been hijacked by radical abortion opponents who forced the decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. Even if that is true, that decision did not inject politics into a process previously devoid of politics.

Millions of Americans believe that Planned Parenthood routinely kills small, helpless human beings. Believe it or not, they have a problem with that. When Komen gives money to Planned Parenthood, it no doubt angers those Americans (and makes them less likely to contribute). When Komen decided that the good it would accomplish by funding Planned Parenthood’s provision of breast exams outweighed the concerns (and reaction) of those millions of Americans, Komen was making a political judgment.

Perhaps Planned Parenthood’s supporters didn’t notice the politics that was always there, since Komen had been making the same political judgment they themselves make. But if Planned Parenthood’s supporters are angry now, it’s not because Komen injected politics into its grant-making. It’s because Komen made a different political judgment and Planned Parenthood lost, for now anyway. (Then again, if donations to Planned Parenthood are the measure, the group may be winning by losing.)

I must confess to a little bit of Schadenfreude here, as those who are complaining about Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood are largely the same folks who applaud President Obama’s decision to force everyone to fund it (and, without a trace of irony, describe themselves as “pro-choice”). I predict that when a future president reverses Obama’s decision, supporters of Obama’s policy will likewise delude themselves that the future president has “injected” politics into the dispute.

UPDATE: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has again adjusted its grant-making policies, and Planned Parenthood will once again be eligible for funding. A reporter asks me: “So what does it mean now that Komen’s reversed itself?” My reply:

It does not mean that politics has been banished from Komen’s decisions. It just means that Komen has again made a political decision that more closely reflects the values of Planned Parenthood’s supporters than its detractors. But that is how we should settle the question of who funds Planned Parenthood: with vigorous debate and by allowing individuals to follow their conscience. When Obamacare ‘settles’ the question by forcing taxpayers to fund Planned Parenthood, it violates everyone’s freedom and dignity.

Two Thoughts on Susan G. Komen & Planned Parenthood is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I write, the House is debating a bill that would repeal the CLASS Act, one of two new entitlements created under ObamaCare. It’s hard express just how awful this program is. Here’s my attempt from back in October, when the Obama administration admitted CLASS is a bust:

The idea behind CLASS was that the government would run a voluntary and self-sustaining insurance plan to help the disabled pay for long-term care, including nursing home care…

Congress required CLASS to set each applicant’s premiums according to the average applicant’s risk of needing such long-term care, rather than her individual risk. But averaged premiums are only attractive to people with above-average risks. Since few people with below-average risks would enroll, the average premium would rise. That would encourage more people with below-average risks not to enroll, and the vicious cycle would continue until the program collapsed.

As it turns out, CLASS collapsed even before its 2012 start date. The same thing happened when Obamacare imposed the same sort of price controls on health insurance for children in September 2010: the markets for child-only coverage collapsed in a total of 17 states, and are slowly collapsing in even more.

Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of insurance saw this coming. The government’s non-partisan actuaries warned of “a very serious risk” that CLASS would be “unsustainable.” One wrote, “Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue.”

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee called CLASS “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” An Obama administration official wrote, “Seems like a disaster to me.” One of President Obama’s own cabinet secretaries called the program “totally unsustainable” and echoed a presidential commission on fiscal responsibility by recommending it be “reformed or repealed.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has diagnosed the fatal flaw in this most ill-conceived government program. I swear, I am not making this up:

The problem with CLASS is that it’s voluntary.

Harkin isn’t the first person to wistfully lament that CLASS would be such a great program if only we could put non-participants in jail. He’s just the first person I know of who has said so explicitly. Others have said that the collapse of the CLASS Act should inspire confidence in the rest of ObamaCare, which imposes the same type of price controls on health insurance, and then threatens to put people in jail if they don’t buy it. Here’s how I described that strategy back in October:

Obamacare inspires confidence in its supporters, then, because one part of the law throws a Hail Mary pass to prevent another part of the law from stripping Americans of the insurance that currently protects them from illness and impoverishment. Feel safer?

Rather than make the CLASS Act compulsory, Congress should make the rest of ObamaCare voluntary:

[Ezra] Klein writes, “One way of looking at the administration’s [CLASS] decision is that it shows a commitment to fiscal responsibility.” If so, then let’s handle the rest of Obamacare exactly the same way. Congress should require Obamacare’s health insurance provisions to be voluntary and self-sustaining, just like CLASS: no individual mandate, no taxpayer subsidies. Or is fiscal irresponsibility part of the plan?

Harkin and other ObamaCare defenders have a profound lack of respect for other people’s freedom and dignity. The problem with that is that it’s voluntary. If it were a medical condition, it might be excusable.

‘The Problem with CLASS Is That It’s Voluntary.’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama is catching some well-earned blowback for his decision to force religious institutions “to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.” You see, ObamaCare penalizes individuals (employers) who don’t purchase (offer) a certain minimum package of health insurance coverage. The Obama administration is demanding that coverage must include the aforementioned reproductive care services. The exception for religious institutions that object to such coverage is so narrow that, as one wag put it, not even Jesus would qualify. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reassures us, “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.” Ummm, Madam Secretary…the Constitution only mentions one of those things. The Catholic church is hopping mad. Even the reliably left-wing E.J. Dionne is angry, writing that the President “utterly botched” the issue “not once but twice” and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

As I wrote over and over as Congress debated ObamaCare, anger and division are inevitable consequences of this law. I recently debated the merits of ObamaCare’s individual mandate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a paragraph that got cut from my essay:

We can be certain…that the mandate will divide the nation. An individual mandate guarantees that the government—not you—will decide what medical services you will purchase, including contraceptives, fertility services that result in the destruction of human embryos, or elective abortions. The same apparatus that can force Americans to subsidize elective abortions can also be used to ban private abortion coverage once the other team wins. The rancor will only grow.

Or as I put it in 2009,

Either the government will force taxpayers to fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will reduce access to abortion coverage. There is no middle ground. Somebody has to lose. Welcome to government-run health care.

The same is true for contraception. The rancor will grow until we repeal this law.

ObamaCare highlights a choice that religious organizations — such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where my grandfather served as counsel — have to make. Either they stop casting their lots with Caesar and join the fight to repeal government health care mandates and subsidies, or they forfeit any right to complain when Caesar turns on them. Matthew 26:52.

Contraceptives Mandate Brings ObamaCare’s Coercive Power into Sharper Focus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In this podcast, I discuss the flap between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum over RomneyCare‘s effect on free riding. I also talk about how some fact checkers misfired when looking into the issue.

Podcast: RomneyCare Free Riding and Fact Checking is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I don’t know which part of this truly dismaying interview is more upsetting: the joy in their voices as these girls describe the “fun” they are having at the riots and their hope that they continue the next day, the class-warfare-based justification they feel for the looting and burning of shops, or their almost comic ignorance of which party holds control of the government (“Conservatives. Yeah. Whatever who it is. I dunno…”).

Listen and Weep, courtesy of the Beeb.

Disgraceful Soundbite from the London Riots is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Barack Obama recently sat down with the Today Show’s Ann Curry to discuss jobs and private sector hiring.  Curry asked him why during a time of “record profits” for corporations they had only spent 2% more toward hiring new workers but 26% percent more on new equipment.

Obama explained how structural economic changes have shifted businesses toward using more equipment and technology, explaining how “businesses have learned to be more efficient with fewer workers” in response to the recession. He provided some examples: “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Much coverage of the interview falsely claimed that Obama blamed technology, or ATMs for high unemployment. This is simply untrue. He did not claim that technology is driving unemployment, but instead that employment is changing as technology increases the productivity of labor.

The interview did reveal that his alleged solution to the problem is more government control of the economy, administered by a panel of experts: “What we have to do now, and this is what the jobs council is all about, is identifying where the jobs for the future are going to be, how do we make sure that there’s a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist, how do we make sure that capital is flowing in those places with the greatest opportunity.” This may sound good in theory, yet the question remains: how does he know where the jobs of the future are going to be, and how can he determine which job training will prove most valuable, and how can he know which areas have the greatest opportunity, and how can he know where to send capital?

It is not likely that the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, made up of about two dozen bright and capable business men and women, will have sufficient knowledge either to determine where capital should flow or where the future jobs will be, or what job training will be best rewarded. Private investors, risking their own capital, cannot consistently predict what markets will succeed or which technologies will flourish. How can we expect a council of political appointees wagering other people’s money to do any better?

Nobel laureate FA Hayek discussed the problems associated with central economic planning in his seminal American Economic Review article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and in his book The Fatal Conceit. Hayek argued that the economy is a very complex system, fueled by the knowledge and actions of millions of independent actors. Hayek warned that any plan to centrally control production would be doomed to inevitable failure because central planners lack sufficient information to ensure that supply equals demand in every market in the economy. The abysmal standard of living and collapse of the Soviet Union validated Hayek’s theory of the impossibility of planning something as complex as a country’s economy.

Clearly, Obama is not suggesting anything nearly as extreme as centrally planned production. Nevertheless, President Obama makes his assumptions clear in this interview that he believes this jobs council holds the capacity to gain sufficient knowledge to help guide capital investments and encourage job creation in the areas they identify. Instead of having our President and a few smart individuals making decisions with limited information, we could allow the market mechanism, made up of millions of individual decision markers, to transmit the information and knowledge necessary for market actors to guide capital appropriately.

For President Obama to assume that he and or his council have the knowledge sufficient to make these determinations is a fatal conceit.

The Fatal Conceit Continues is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new World Bank working paper by Jean-Pierre Chauffour (author of the Cato book, The Power of Freedom: Uniting Human Rights and Development) finds that freedom is the root cause of development. In contrast to economic, political and civil freedoms, Chauffour finds that “beyond core functions of government. . . the expansion of the state to provide for various entitlements, including so-called economic, social and cultural rights, may not make people richer in the long run and may even make them poorer.”

Freedom vs. Entitlements is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Postal Vision 2020 is a conference scheduled for June in Arlington, VA, that will discuss the U.S. Postal Service’s long-term prospects in our increasingly digitized world. Here’s how the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe frames the gathering:

As mail volume continues to plummet and more Americans use the Internet to pay bills and keep in touch, Google executives, social media experts and some of the most passionate tech evangelists are planning to meet in Crystal City in mid-June to sort out how to save and remake the nation’s mail delivery service.

That sounds like a good group for discussing ideas on how to “remake the nation’s mail delivery service” given that the USPS is the antithesis of companies like Google. Creative, innovative, entrepreneurial, and competitive are words that one would associate with Google—not the government’s mail monopoly. However, should these folks be getting together to discuss saving the USPS? That notion strikes me as akin to having Henry Ford come up with ideas on saving the horse and buggy.

As I discuss in a Cato essay on the USPS, the socialist mail enterprise cannot survive in its current form—at least not without a reintroduction of taxpayer subsidies. The USPS’s revenue base has been irrevocably undermined by the growth in digital communications, and congressional micromanagement makes sufficient cost-cutting extremely difficult. Thus, I would argue that the goal should be to create a market for postal services rather than to “save” the USPS:

Policymakers resistant to reform often depict the USPS as a “national asset” that “binds the nation together.” But these days, it’s the Internet and our telecommunications networks that bind families and businesses together across the nation. It’s time to let go of the nostalgia for the USPS and bring America’s postal services into the 21st century with privatization, open competition, and entrepreneurial innovation.

Unfortunately, the sclerosis at the USPS is a reflection of the sclerosis in Congress. As Chris Edwards and I have repeatedly discussed with each other, it is incredibly difficult for Congress to think outside the box on policy. One reason is that because the federal government has become so massive, policymakers have little time to devote to big ideas like transforming the USPS. That, of course, assumes that policymakers are interested in such big ideas. For many members of Congress, interest in the USPS doesn’t go much further than franking privileges and naming post offices.

Postal Vision 2020 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

New York state senator Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) is crusading to ban pedestrians’ use of cellphones and other mobile devices while crossing the street. It’s for your own good, you must understand:

“When people are doing things that are detrimental to their own well being, then government should step in.”

The Daily Caller asked me to write an opinion piece about this proposal so I just did. Excerpt:

Phone use on the street has become near-ubiquitous in recent years, yet over nearly all that time — nationally as in Gotham — pedestrian death rates were falling steadily, just as highway fatalities fell steadily over the years in which “distracted driving” became a big concern.

In the first half of 2010, the national statistics showed a tiny upward blip (0.4 percent), occasioned by a relative handful of fatalities in a few states. Even a spokesman for the Governor’s Highway Safety Association, Jonathan Adkins, seems to agree it’s premature to jump to conclusions: “You don’t want to overreact to six months of data,” he told columnist Steve Chapman.

Like others who seek quasi-parental control over adults, Sen. Kruger tends to infantilize his charges. He told the Times: “We’re taught from knee-high to look in both directions, wait, listen and then cross. You can perform none of those functions if you are engaged in some kind of wired activity.”

This drew proper scorn from columnist Chapman: “Actually, you can perform all those functions and dance an Irish jig, even with text messages or rock music bombarding you.” That some ear bud devotees don’t take due caution is no reason to pretend they can’t.

C.S. Lewis, Lily Tomlin and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood all get walk-on parts as well.

A Ban On “Walking While Wired”? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new Cato Policy Analysis, “Marriage against the State: Toward a New View of Civil Marriage.”

As I note in the introduction, it’s quite rare that Congress ever considers marriage as a policy area in its own right. There are comprehensive health care bills, defense spending bills, farm bills, and civil rights bills, but no really comprehensive marriage bills.

Of course, this might be a good thing, but one of the side effects is that marriage policy can be haphazard in the extreme. Inconsistencies and surprises abound. Marriage influences welfare, immigration, tax law, child custody and support, and many others besides.

Are all of these things legitimate? A popular view among libertarians is that the federal government, and possibly the states, should get out of the marriage business altogether. It’s an approach with much to recommend it, but I can’t entirely agree. For at least some areas of public policy, marriage represents a barrier to government meddling in your financial, family, and intimate life. In these areas, it’s an unqualified good. Marriage is often a defense against the state, and as such, it’s something libertarians ought to want.

Consider child custody. All children born to a married couple are presumed to belong to them. You don’t have to do anything special to assert your paternity (or maternity). You are presumed to have it. This is probably for the best. Inviting the government to prospectively examine married couples’ fitness as parents is one of the most corrosive things I could imagine doing to the nuclear family.

Or consider the gift-tax exemption for married couples. Husbands and wives may gift one another money or property without limits, tax-free. It’s an important part of the financial independence that we are accustomed to having in our families, and it allows a family to conduct an interdependent financial life with dignity and autonomy.

Yet this same exemption, oddly enough, can make a legal divorce cheaper than the breakup of a never-married relationship. A married couple can divide their assets, including houses, cars, and other properties, before they split up. A never-married couple will often have to pay taxes on their pre-breakup transfers — making the government in effect a third party to their relationship. No one would want this for all couples, of course, least of all libertarians.

Extricating marriage from other parts of federal law won’t be easy, either. For some fairly complicated reasons that I explain in the paper, the only way to make the income tax fully neutral with respect to marriage — and also neutral across families with unequal income distributions between spouses — is to adopt a flat tax. While I share the view of many of my Cato colleagues that a flat tax is a good idea, the marriage-related consequences of our current tax system aren’t always appreciated as a reason to move in that direction. They should be.

As a third example, consider immigration. Marriage to a citizen considerably hastens the process of immigrating legally. Even if that process were not unconscionably slow (which I think it is), we would probably still want the immigration of marriage partners to be a high priority. Immigrant spouses of citizens are clearly integrated to some extent into American society. The American spouses’ own liberty interests are clearly implicated. And, perhaps best of all for critics of immigration, immigrant spouses’ numbers are relatively small in any case.

Lastly, and because I know a lot of you probably skimmed up to this point, I do discuss same-sex marriage. One of the more common arguments against same-sex marriage is that those who have moral objections shouldn’t be forced to subsidize same-sex unions with their tax money.

Let’s grant the basic justice of the argument (and never mind that Quakers, Buddhists, and others could morally object to our enormous defense spending!). Still, it’s not well known that by the best available estimates, federal same-sex marriage would leave the government in a better fiscal position, not a worse one. A good way to channel less federal money to same-sex couples is actually… to allow them to marry.

Why is this? Well, some married couples still pay a marriage penalty, and gay and lesbian couples obviously would too. More significantly, spouses’ incomes and assets are declared in the means testing for federal welfare programs. Marriage would exclude some gays and lesbians from these programs. They may want marriage anyway, but on balance, it’s clearly not for grabbing federal dollars.

I discuss quite a few other marriage-related issues in this Policy Analysis, and even so, it’s not remotely comprehensive. My goal is to suggest a new way of thinking about marriage, one that evaluates the effects of various marriage-related policies using the individual right to form a family as the standard. Not every aspect of federal marriage policy stands up, but some of them do. Let’s let a new conversation begin.

Marriage against the State is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, I mentioned a recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General on some potentially improper instances of FBI monitoring of domestic anti-war groups. It occurs to me that it also provides a useful data point that’s relevant to last week’s post about the pitfalls of thinking about the proper limits of government information gathering exclusively in terms of “privacy.”

As the report details, an agent in the FBI’s Pittsburgh office sent a confidential source to report on organizing meetings for anti-war marches held by the anarchist Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG). The agent admitted to OIG that his motive was a general desire to cultivate an informant rather than any particular factually grounded investigative purpose. Unsurprisingly, reports generated by the source contained “no information remotely relevant to actual or potential criminal activity,” and at least one report was “limited to identifying information about the participants in a political discussion together with characterizations of the contents of the speech of the participants.” The agent dutifully recorded that at one such gathering “Meeting and discussion was primarily anti anything supported by the main stream [sic] American.”

Now, in fact, the OIG suggests that the retention in FBI records of personally identifiable information about citizens’ political speech, unrelated to any legitimate investigation into suspected violations of federal law, may well have violated the Privacy Act. But if we wanted to pick semantic nits, we could surely make the argument that this is not really an invasion of “privacy” as traditionally conceived—and certainly not as conceived by our courts. The gatherings don’t appear to have been very large—the source was able to get the names and ages of all present—but they were, in principle, announced on the Web and open to the public.

Fortunately, the top lawyer at the Pittsburgh office appears to have been duly appalled when he discovered what had been done, and made sure the agents in the office got a refresher training on the proper and improper uses of informants. But as a thought experiment, suppose this sort of thing were routine. Suppose that any “public” political meeting, at least for political views regarded as out of the mainstream, stood a good chance of being attended by a clandestine government informant, who would record the names of the participants and what each of them said, to be filed away in a database indefinitely.  Would you think twice before attending? If so, it suggests that the limits on state surveillance of the population appropriate to a free and democratic society are not exhausted by those aimed at protecting “privacy” in the familiar sense.

Speech, Privacy, and Government Infiltration is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Every couple of weeks, the Economist conducts an on-line debate between two economists over a timely public policy issue.  This week’s debate features yours truly, debating Professor Wayne Guay of the Wharton School.  The question being debated:  should government regulate the pay of corporate executives?

You probably won’t be surprised to learn I take the position that government should generally stay out of regulating executive pay (or any pay).  To see my argument, just follow the link.

Should Govt Regulate Executive Pay? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

For supporters of Title IX, it’s time to put down the pom-poms.

From the start, Title IX has been an unnecessary and destructive imposition of government and bureaucracy into college sports, substituting regulation and litigation for the free choices of women and men. But yesterday’s ruling that competitive cheerleading isn’t a sport — a decision worth reading just for its brilliant illustration of the torturous athlete-accounting and word-parsing Title IX demands – highlights how truly absurd it has become.

For one thing, tell the women (and men) in competitive cheer that it isn’t a sport – most would probably beg to differ. Much more important, when we have judges ruling what does or does not constitute a sport we have clearly given up way too much freedom in our supposedly free society. Finally, the very basis for Title IX – the notion that women will be systematically and unfairly barred from various activities by misogynistic colleges — just makes no sense, especially today. The fact is, women make up the very large majority of college students, and hence can dictate terms to schools. At least, they can dictate terms if schools want to keep competing in the sport we call “staying in business.”

Which brings us to what probably really scares Title IX fans: Women almost certainly don’t want to participate in intercollegiate athletics as much as men do, a likelihood evidenced by everything from hugely greater male participation in open-access intramural sports, to men choosing ESPN and women choosing Facebook while on the Web. The problem, of course, is that to admit that would be to lose the ability to push schools around with the big ol’ federal government.

No Cheers for Title IX is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog